PC in SA: January 2007

16 January 2007

Believe it or not but we are back at home and back to the grindstone (or something of that sort!?). Hope everyone had a happy holiday season. 2007 is already here. This is the year we are dubbing, “the year we leave South Africa!” Its crazy that we are far over the halfway hump.

Everyone wants to know about our short travels. That is why I am here. This might get kind of long but it wasn’t the shortest vacation that we took!

First stop was Cape Town. Definitively the most famous city in South Africa but probably in all of Africa. The great part of staying in Cape Town was our hosts, Stefan and Christine. They are a South African family that we met while we were in Kruger and they graciously hosted us in the home. The view of the famous Table Mountain out the front door was awesome!

Cape Town as a city was nice just not very African. It is a European city with A LOT of Europeans living there!? The location is pretty awesome with Table Mountain, the Cape of Good Hope and the ocean right there. The food was awesome, very westernized. We ate out every night and had great meals, again the European influence.

Beside the usual walking endless miles around a city, we took in the sights. We tackled Table Mountain one day. As the weather can change in a heartbeat there and the Southeasterly wind was unbearable at times, we held off on two days that looked questionable. But finally we got the courage and somewhat decent weather and hike up the side of Table Mountain. After about 2 hours of pretty strenuous climbing, we made it to the top. Once there we almost blew over several times as the wind is Chicago windy and we almost froze, as we didn’t expect it to be cold and didn’t bring much gear. After looking around up top and check the views of the city and of Robben Island, it was hiking it back down. As the cable car was not running on our summit day due to the high winds (see I wasn’t over exaggerating)!

Another day was spent hiking up another peak right next to the city center. Not as strenuous and definitely not as windy, it was a nice little hike up Lion’s Head! Other activities of Cape Town were the lovely city gardens which seem to be the place where everyone who gets married in Cape Town gets their after wedding photo shoot. Kirschten Bosch gardens was another little day trip. A beautifully manicured gardens on the other side of Table Mountain. A nice place to just lay in the grass and enjoy the plant life.

The waterfront was another interesting location. Just like any harbor, kind of reminded me a lot of California’s various waterfronts. There were seals to entertain the wife too! The waterfront was the location of departure for Robben Island. Robben Island is the location of the prison where during the Apartheid, they sent all of the political prisoners (aka Nelson Mandela). If you haven’t read his ‘A Long Walk to Freedom’, do it. After the hour ferry ride out to the island we quickly took a tour the island seeing where the lime quarry (read the book, but where they made the prisoners work mining stones that they never used), house, church and the jail were situated. Then a tour through the prison with a former inmate of the prison. The man was jailed because his part in the anti-apartheid army that the ANC had formed. The tour showed the small cells and small spaces where the men were housed. And yes, we saw Nelson Mandela’s cell.

Another highlight of the area is Simon’s Town. And their Penguins. At a park called the Boulders, a colony of African penguins live. Quite amazing creatures to watch. There were a couple of boardwalks that snaked their way along the beach through the penguins’ habits. Interesting to see although they weren’t too playful as their molting season was just ending!

Hiring a car, it was to the east along the coast (prime whale watching country). We stopped in a town called Hermanus, but didn’t see anything. We continued down the coast to Gaansbai and sat along the cliffs. After about 15 minutes, several miles down the coast two whales are surfacing. We aren’t sure what kind, as it was the end of the season and they were far out to sea. It was either the Southern Right or the Humpback whale. After watching this oddly fascinating activity, we headed as far south as possible to Cape Agulhas, the southern most point in Africa. Very exciting, not really but kind cool to go all the way down there! It is also (debated) the point where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet…or so they say.

The following day was devoted to a small nature reserve, De Hoop, along the coast. Know for having the rare mountain zebra and again a great place to spot whales. My personal favorite was the white faced Hartebeest. The mountain zebra was pretty cool as it look like a zebra but you get dizzy faster looking at these because of their stripes! We did spot whales again. A lot farther out but these guys were a lot more playful breaching quite often.

(Andrea here – Adam developed carpel tunnel and I had to take over) Our next stop was a small town called Knysna. Not much exciting there – we wandered around the town trying to do things but a lot of stuff was closed. We did successfully hike up to the top of a big hill overlooking the town and the bay to some old fort ruins, and there was a street fair one night that kept us entertained. As it was a few days before Christmas, the street venders were really trying to sell their stuff. One woman stuck out – a Muslim woman in a traditional dress and veil (not over her face, just around her head) who had a santa hat flashing ‘2007’ on her head, a flashing pacifier sucker in her mouth and a light up toy gun in her hand. Wish I had my camera.

The next stop was Mossel Bay where we undertook quite an adventure – a 4 day SCUBA diving class! A friend came to join us, which was fun. The first day was classroom stuff all morning and then we went to a public pool where our instructor verified that we could actually swim. The next day started with classroom stuff again and ended in a different, thankfully private, pool where we donned our scuba gear for the first time and swam around this tiny underwater area for a few hours, learning how to breathe and do things like recover our respirator if it comes out of your mouth or clear water out of the mask. The next day was d-day – the first day in the ocean! We first had to do a snorkel to again prove that we could swim in the ocean, and then we put on all the gear (it’s so heavy!!) and walked in to the sea! It was a little scary at first. The visibility was not very good and as Adam and I were trying to descend (you always dive with a buddy!) to the ocean floor to join the others, we looked around and realized we didn’t know where the others were! But our instructor came to get us and show us the way. It was pretty crazy just sitting there on the ocean floor in a circle, reminding yourself that it was ok to breathe and listening to your breath escape in bubbles over your head but hearing nothing else. The surge was moving us around a little and it took some concentration and practice just to be able to sit upright and not fall over backwards! We had to go through the same drills all over again – learning to share air with our diving buddy in case of emergency and how to communicate when you can’t talk. That first day we saw lots of fish, an octopus, and a small pajama shark. The next day we did two more dives and the conditions were about the same. It’ll be nice to go somewhere with visibility that allows you to see farther than 6 feet! We saw some neat corals and fish as we tried to relax, get used to a completely different environment, and learn to control our buoyancy so we can swim up off the bottom, but don’t shoot up to the surface. It was a very neat experience and I hope we get a chance to continue diving. Mossel Bay was a nice place. They have a beautiful rocky coastline, and did I mention they also have the world’s second highest concentration of great white sharks?? There is an island just off the main beach where thousands of seals live – a great white’s favorite food! We didn’t see any, but we were assured they were out there. If you ever get the crazy notion to go shark cage diving, this is the place to do it, I guess! There is also some neat history to this town. As early as 1600 ships trying to reach the West Indies would stop in the sheltered bay where there was also a fresh water spring. There is a very huge and old tree where the passing ships would leave notes and packages for other ships to take back to Europe or carry to India.

Plettenburg Bay was next. We went sea kayaking on a beautiful, calm morning and paddled for an hour or so without seeing anything. Then our guide who is just ahead of us starts shouting at us to paddle fast and points out to sea. Coming fast towards us and parallel to the shore was a big pod of dolphins, periodically surfacing and leaping completely out of the water. We paddled hard to get in front of them and then turned the kayak to travel with them. It was amazing – they were all around us and there must have been at least 50 of them. They surfaced right next to our kayak, some were jumping out of the water, and swimming around and underneath us, and then they were gone, traveling so fast we couldn’t keep up. Turns out they were common dolphin, a species that is rarely seen so close to shore and even our guide was pumped up after the experience and he got on his cell phone (yes, he had his cell phone in a dry bag around his neck) to alert others in the area of their presence. It was an awesome experience – I can’t even describe the beauty and thrill of it.

We headed to a place called Tsitsikama National Forest for the Christmas holiday. It’s a strip of indigenous forest right alongside the ocean. Christmas day we hiked out to a beautiful and pretty remote cove with big green hills droping into a river mouth. A bunch of other people had the same idea though but it was still lovely. We had a big dinner that night with the staff of the hostel where we were staying, along with the hostel owner’s family and a handful of other families. It was a great meal – turkey, chicken, ham, stuffing, American style gravy (which we have never seen here!), vegetables and some amazing deserts – plum pudding flambé with brandy butter and a trifle with homemade ice cream. It was quite a feast and even though it wasn’t our family, it was nice to be around someone’s family and some other friendly travelers who became our family for a night. On Christmas Eve we had met a woman who worked at a nearby elephant sanctuary who gave us free passes to come visit. So the next day we had the cool experience of getting up close and personal with a small herd of young-ish elephants who were rescued from various strange situations (one was a house pet who got to big – duh!) and will one day be released into the wild again. We got to walk with them, trunk in hand, and get up close to see their ears and feet and tusks and in their mouths. They are amazing creatures!

We picked up another rental car to allow us to drive out to Addo Elephant Park near East London. It’s a big national park that has lots of, you guessed it, elephants! We expected to see a lot of elephants there but we really weren’t prepared for the amount of elephants we actually saw. The first morning we were there we saw a few at a small water hole, and one herd along the road. Then we stopped at a bigger water hole to eat lunch in the car and see what came along. Two solo male elephants wandered in from opposite directions and got fully into the water to roll around and splash mud everywhere. Then across the plains we could see two more male elephants come in. Then a whole herd appeared old mothers and young babies. Then two more herds. And another, and another. At one point there had to have been at least 100 elephants of all ages and sizes crowded around this big, but not THAT big water hole. They were all splashing and playing, a few of the adolescents were mock fighting with each other, and the babies were squealing and trumpeting while they played. Members of different herds greeted each other and enjoyed the cool water and mud. It was pretty cool to watch – I could have sat there all day, and we did indeed sit there for a long time. We spent a day and a half in the park and definitely got our fill of elephants. We also saw lots of zebra, kudu, hartebeest, buffalo, and others. We had three new sightings there too. We saw a fox at one of the watering holes, and a jackal on two different occasions. And we were driving down a road the last morning and found a big safari truck and one SUV parked on the side of the road so we pulled up to see what it was and there was a jackal mother with an adolescent cub just laying on the side of the road in broad daylight! They soon got up and slowly loped away, looking back at us as they went. That was the first hyena we have seen – weird creatures, but very neat. They definitely look powerful and a little menacing!

Next up was Coffee Bay where we would spend New Year’s. We drove in on a very, very scary road through the mountains with people, herds of sheep, goats, and cows wandering on the road alongside potholes bigger than our car (really.). Throw in a light rain and fog and we had a terrible and stressful trip! But we thankfully arrived safe and sound. We knew that a few other Peace Corps friends were going to be in Coffee Bay also, but upon arrival we bumped into 6 other people from the newest group of South African volunteers, and later found out that 6 others from our group were staying in the hostel across the street from ours. So we got to spend New Year’s surrounded by friends which was nice. New Years Eve day we took a small trip with the hostel to a beautiful spot on the coast where we took a 3-hour hike and got the chance to do some cliff jumping into a river. Adam did the highest one – they said it was 9 meters (27 feet) high, but I chickened out a little and only did the 7 meter one. It was scary up there as you look all the way down, and even though I had seen lots of other people do it and live, I just couldn’t make my feet jump! The area around Coffee Bay was beautiful – big green hills dropping off into the sea. We saw an African drumming show on New Year’s Eve, and then a DJ took over, who forgot to do a countdown to midnight!! What’s New Year’s Eve without a countdown?? We just heard corks popping all around us as people realized it was after midnight. Oh well. We hiked the next day along the coast to a place called hole in the wall, as it is a big rock cliff in the ocean with a hole in it.

Leaving Coffee Bay, we wanted to visit two isolated nature reserves on the coast that we had read about, but after driving for 3 hours on terrible roads (better weather this time though) we made it there and found that there was really nothing to see without a 4-wheel drive vehicle. That was a big disappointment. But we hiked to a waterfall and saw the ocean, had some lunch, and carried on to Cintas, another small town on the coast. A very windy place – great for the kite surfers there but it doesn’t make swimming or walking on the beach much fun – feels like you’re being sand blasted! We took a canoe up a river one day and then fought the wind to get back out. The moon was full one night while we were there and we took a walk on the beach. As we headed back in we walked across a patch of sand with a thin layer of water on top of it. Adam was in front of me and as he stepped on it, lights went off under his feet and spread out in a small circle. There were phosphorescent creatures in the water that glowed when agitated by our footsteps. It was really neat – with every step you took this weird green glow would radiate from your feet.

Our last adventure of the trip was a big one – a 6-day, 100 kilometer hike through the Amatola Mountains in the southeastern part of the country. The hike was a challenging one, but fun. The scenery was great and quite variable over the 6 days. We saw waterfalls every day, walked across open fields, through cultivated pine forests, and wonderful indigenous forests with towering trees. It’s not quite as hardcore as it sounds – there are huts along the way, and you sleep in a bed each night. They provide firewood for cooking and fresh water and there’s even a shower. Don’t get me wrong though – we hiked about 18 kilometers each day (about 10 miles) and were exhausted by the time we got to the hut. And food is heavy! Our first two days went well aside from sore shoulders and feet. We arrived at the hut on the second day just as it started to rain. We naively thought ‘hey, this can’t last all night’. I awoke several times throughout the night to pouring rain and thunder. Still raining the next morning, we put off leaving as long as possible, hoping it would stop or at least slow down, but no. Still thinking ‘hey, this can’t last all day’ we set out. Wrong again. We stayed semi-dry for the first hour or so and then we had to cross the waterfall. I’m sure on a regular day, the waterfall crossing would be no big deal, but it had been pouring for over 12 hours and the waterfall we crossed was raging and angry. We crossed on a tier of the falls – water shooting down from a ledge above on our right, and water tumbling off another ledge to our left. Kinda scary, but we plunged in, got soaked, and made it across. The rest of the day was terrible. The rain did not stop. It was supposed to the day where we saw some of the best waterfalls, but we chose to bypass that route and take forest roads to the hut. It still took us 7 hours of hiking through the pouring rain, not stopping because we got too cold when we stopped moving, to get to the hut where we climbed into dry clothes and right into our sleeping bags to warm up before cooking and eating two meals in four hours. The rain finally stopped in the evening and the next day the sun broke through and came back to warm us. The rest of the hike was great – again, beautiful scenery. We stumbled into the town of Hogsback, named for the mountains with rocky cliff tops that look like the hair on the back of a wild pig, on day 6, hungry and tired and glad to be done, but it was a good hike. The area where we were hiking is rumored to be a place where JRR Tolkien spent some time as a child and they say he modeled some of the landscapes in Lord of the Rings after that area. As we were hiking, it definitely seemed like it could be true. Walking through those indigenous forest with enormous trees towering over your head, it’s hard not to feel a bit like a hobbit, and I wouldn’t have been shocked if one of those trees bent down to talk.

Our adventures over, we started the long trip home. It took us three days. It could have taken two, but we lingered in Kimberly for a day for one last shower and the chance to pay someone else to do our laundry. Back in the village, school started again for the teachers on Monday and for the kids on Wednesday. We have a few plans of things we want to accomplish this year, but can’t help looking forward to September and our time here being finished. Our schools have been declared free for all who want to attend, which has led to an increase in roll. The first grade class at our village’s school has 51 kids. One teacher. One classroom. And 90% of them haven’t attended school before. (There is a preschool in the next village over run by the Catholic Church, but it costs money and only the well off kids, or kids whose parents know the value of an education, go there). So imagine that, all of you who teach or have experience with first graders. Things are different here!

A few things changed at home while we were away, mainly our sister, Malebogo left to attend school at Mafikeng, about 4 hours from here. She’s going to be studying catering. Her son had just learned to walk when we left and was at the cutest stage, but he has gone to stay with our mom’s sister in the next village over so the house seems empty without the both of them. Our brother Paseka has passed to the third grade and is doing well. He got the chance to go see a friend in Johannesburg over break, which is quite a trip for a boy from the village. He was ecstatic because he got to go to a soccer match at the big stadium in town.

Well I hope this letter finds all of you well. No, we didn’t go MIA over the holidays, just a long vacation and limited access to computers. Hope you didn’t miss us too much! I hope you all enjoyed your holidays and had a chance to relax and enjoy life a little bit. We missed our family and friends, and thought of you all at home eating Christmas-time treats and were jealous! Love to you all. A & A