T.I.A.

South Africa is officially added to the list of places I have to come back to.
I feel like I could write a page about every little thing I did in South Africa but I will try to make it short to spare you and my grades (I actually have a paper due tomorrow).

        First I should introduce “The Big Five” since I will be talking about them a lot, and no I’m not talking about the African animals. It includes me, John, Andy, Ralph, and Grant. Andy and Ralph go to school together in Miami and are of Cuban Decent. My mom refers to them as her other two sons after meeting them in the Bahamas. Grant is a dive master in Hawaii so naturally we bonded over dive stories, and of course John is my childhood friend. We all have long range walkie-talkies so we can coordinate on the ship and in port in a world without cell phones.  Having a solid crew of funny people really makes everything more enjoyable

        Back to Africa- I’ll start with the Safari. I have two main observations from the Safari and Amazon trip; 1. It’s a pain in the ass to get to the middle of nowhere and 2. I’ve watched Planet Earth too many times. The Safari was cool but I expected to see lions pouncing on Impala and crocodiles ambushing wildebeest, but instead we “just” saw giraffes, buffalos, zebras, wildebeest, rhinos and baboons. Still I cool experience but not exactly discovery channel cool.

        The two days in Cape Town after the Safari were perhaps two of the most extreme days of my life. Grant got in contact with this guy, Gavin, who owns a company called “Extreme Scene” and he set us up with activities for Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday John, Grant and I went Scuba diving in the predator tank of the Cape Town aquarium. It was us, a guide, and about 5 huge sharks swimming around the aquarium while crowds of people waved to us from behind the glass. I’m not quite sure how we were able to do this but it was sweet.

Wednesday gets even more ridiculous. Gavin drove us two hours away to a company that does shark cage diving. It is actually the company that the discovery channel works with for its shark week so this time it was discovery channel cool. I was in the cage first and literally within 10 seconds of getting in the water a 16 foot great white shark rammed the cage basically trying to eat me. The huge waves made everything even more intense since I was getting slammed around in the cage. The whole thing was a total rush. After shark diving Gavin drove us another two hours to go bungee jumping off an 800 foot high bridge. I’m not going to try to be tough about this; standing on the edge of the bridge about to jump was terrifying, way worse than skydiving. The cord stopped me only about 30 feet from the ground...I was on adrenalin overload.

Cape Town’s nightlife consisted of classy clubs and crazy bars, the details of which I will save for emails ? and mom don’t worry, I attended a lecture on climate change at the Kingsbury botanical gardens on my last day in Cape Town so I did something educational. Also a couple people were wondering why I don’t have many deep revelations about my experiences on this blog as I guess many people do. I do notice profound things but it is not really in my style to write about them. I save it all for my journal which I write in every day and will be awesome to read when I’m 60.

Now it’s back to life on the ship for our longest stretch at sea this semester. We will follow the coast of South Africa until Mozambique where we go east of Madagascar for a bunker stop in Port Louis on Mauritius. Last night was the roughest waves we have had yet and it was pretty fun for me, not for those who get sea sick and today I had to meet with everyone in the Red Sea to allocate events for the upcoming sea Olympics. I also want to with Eileen a happy belated birthday!