Cape Adventures

This weekend I went with five friends on an epic journey to Cape Town. It commenced on a 5:55am flight on Thursday and ended when we got back to International House around 11am that Sunday. The trip involved little sleep, much travel, and some amazing sites of the city in South Africa I am vaguely regretting not studying in.
Unfortunately my camera is still dead, so pictures will not be forthcoming until I steal them from others, but I can go through some highlights from our crazy but short trip down to the southernmost part of the African continent.

-Thursday, after waking up at 3:30am, booking it to the airport, getting held up and almost missing our flight and finally getting on and reaching Cape Town two hours after, we spent the day exploring the winelands of Cape Town. It was about an hour drive from where we were staying (a pretty nice backpackers place near the center of downtown Cape Town. Ok it's a backpackers, so my standards were fairly low, but still... nice) which we got to on a nice road-trip in a car we rented. The vineyard we stopped at was very nice with picturesque rows of grapes amid mountains in the distance. Cape Town is cool because it's right on the Indian Ocean, but it also has these gorgeous mountains. I experienced my first wine tasting and felt really sophisticated. Kind of. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I think I pretended really well. I'm pretty sure the wines I liked were the less classy ones (judging from their pricing) but I don't care.

-Friday: In the morning we explored the downtown area, went to some markets and bartered for some souvenirs. I suppose we probably still got ripped off, but we did argue the prices down. Afterward we took a car tour of the coast. It was so pretty! We were trying to compare it to beautiful places in the world, but we couldn't think of something that quite matched. Nothing in the States at least. We stopped at this place that supposedly had penguins, but we didn't find any at first. Sasha and I went exploring over rocks and through the water and after a bit of trekking we finally found quite a few. They are so cute and awkward, they put so much effort into walking because it takes them so long to pick up their feet. We got like three feet away from a couple of them. It was so cool. I think there were some good pictures from that, so hopefully in my next post I can include those. We watched the sun set over the ocean while sitting on a rock ledge above the water. It was breathtaking.

-Saturday was our last full day in Cape Town. Sasha, Teresa and Nathan (the three other Americans who came along) went up Table Mountain by cable-car. Apparently you can see the entire cape from there. I didn't go up because I'm coming back to Cape Town with my mom in a few weeks (I'm so excited for that!) and I wanted to leave at least one thing to do new with her. That night we went to one of our friend's friend's birthday party which basically lasted until we had to get going for our flight home. We ended up packing up at 3:45am and heading out to catch our 5:45am flight back to Joburg. We were all pretty delirious at this point, and again we had some issues with getting onto our flight (mainly because two of our crowd booked for the day after accidentally) but we all made it back in one piece. Yay!

I am so glad I got the chance to visit Cape Town. Honestly I don't know why on earth it didn't happen earlier. And while I have enjoyed my time at Wits, I would not have complained if Wits happened to be in Cape Town rather than Joburg. I guess you can't have it all though.