another dolphin! - Namibia

Dolphin - Catamaran Cruise, Namibia

Rebecca and I in the Namib Desert

Guys at the market with their topper cookies!

Sand dunes in the Namib Desert!

Going down a sand dune in Namibia

Quadding in Namibia

My Week in South Africa

We are leaving South Africa right now after spending a week in this amazing country. I’m pretty sad about it, but actually at the moment I am overwhelmed with feeling nauseous as we round the cape towards India. We were just told to secure our belongings

...Just after I finished that sentence I had to get up to be sick...it is now about 20 hours later, and I am just starting to recover from the medication I took from the ship. It is known to make you sleep 12 hours or more. I woke up feeling very groggy and weak and am now just beginning my day at about 5pm. So anyways...back to my story telling...

My first day in South Africa was last Friday. I got off the ship with my friends and we walked around Cape Town for a little while, and I got some kind of delicious steak wrap for lunch. I had to be back around 1 for my Ostrich Ranch and Wine Tasting trip so I didn’t stay out for long. The Ostrich Ranch was so much fun! I saw emus, tortoises, ostriches and baby ostriches, peacocks, and some other colorful bird. I even got to sit on the ostrich! Some funny pictures will be posted soon. After we left the ranch, we headed to a winery nearby called Durbanville Hills. It was beautiful there. From there we could see the wine fields as well as a spectacular view of Table Mountain. After being given a view of the processing plant, we got the chance to taste 8 different wines. They were all very distinctive tasting...I tend to prefer a lighter, fruitier flavor. There was one particular chardonnay that had a nutty aftertaste which I must say was not my favorite. It was a lot of fun though, and I wish I were able to bring a bottle back home, but SAS unfortunately will not store it nor allow it onboard. In order to send any back to the states, you must get a minimum of 12 bottles and pay excessive shipping and handling per bottle. Oh well, I will be back to Africa again. After we came back from this fun field trip, I went out to dinner with my friends at this restaurant called Quay Four right near the dock on the waterfront. There was a live band playing and we saw a lot of SAS people there as well. I split 2 meals with Tori. One was 28 prawns for 99Rand (about $12 US!) which was delicious and huge so we split that and got a steak sandwich to split as well. Both were very good...we’re getting spoiled with this in-port food. I got a mixed drink named “Call Me a Taxi” which was kind of interesting ...some banana strawberry sort of mix I think. I split something called a jug with Savannah and Tori and we had ordered some kind of fruity concoction but ended up with something else... I came back from the bathroom to find this brownish mixture with cucumbers floating in it. It was made with soda water/gingerale, some kind of local alcohol called Pims, and the cucumbers. It wasn’t horrible, but definitely not what we were expecting... We had a lot of fun but I had to leave for my safari by six the next morning so I came back by about 11pm.

The next day, Saturday morning, I woke up early to meet in the Union for my safari. It was a sight I will not soon forget. Multiple very drunk individuals stumbled in, either only holding their passport, passed out on one of the benches, or one, not even making our flight at all. The funny thing is, the guy who missed our flight ended up seeing 5 lions hunting as he came to the reserve at dusk. We were all pretty jealous...it’s funny how things work out. The flight to Durban was about 2 hours, and the drive there was about 4. It made for a long day. We met our guide at the airport...Kobus is his name, though he told us we could call him Stephen because it’s easier to remember. I came to know him fondly as Kobus (Quibbis is how you pronounce it). He is a strange and crazy man and I had the time of my life. On the way into the park there were elephants on the side of the road, yet somehow I think I missed it. That was a mistake on my part because we didn’t see elephants again! That’s the thing about the wild...it’s really a toss-up where, when, and if you will see these animals. When we went it happened to be particularly cold, and even rainy. I wouldn’t change my experience for anything though, not even to go to Kruger where they saw many lions. I don’t think it’s the same experience...staying in a 5-star hotel 45 minutes from the game reserve, or in a tent in the middle of a lion pride hearing hyenas around the campfire at night. Something I can’t even begin to explain... On the first day we were given eggs and our objective was to  not let them break. We all had to give the egg a name and a face, so of course I thought of the Lion King movie. I was going to name mine Simba, but seeing as I’m a girl I decided to go with Nala (Simba’s lioness in the movie) ...I should’ve known at least one of the guys would name his Simba. So we had to go around the circle telling the egg’s name, and as soon as Kobus found out there was a Simba and Nala, he made us be a family and have a baby egg. I named him Mufasa. Yes I’m very original I know. Somehow things progressed and we ended up with a total of 8 eggs between the two of us. For some reason I had to carry all of them except Chris’ (Simba). I don’t know how it happened because everyone else only had one egg, two at the most. I ran out of Lion King names once I used Nala, Mufasa, Pumba, Timon, and Zazu. Then I moved onto Aladdin and named the last two Iago and Abu. We were competing to try to get a photograph taken by Kobus. One was of the typical savanna tree in front of a sunset and the other was half of a young male lion’s face, taken without zoom. Kobus took it under his truck only a few feet away from the lion.

So the next morning we woke up at about 5am, had biscuits and coffee and went out for a morning game drive. After that we had breakfast, talked for awhile about all kinds of things including our guide’s crazy experiences. We had a few more game drives that day and I got to see so many animals! Zebra, kudu, impala, nyala, black and white rhinoceros, buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, warthog, monkey, baboon, vulture... It was so much fun and we had a lot of cool people on our trip. Amy (or Pippy) was our leader or (psychologist on the ship)...Yellow, Huene (wrong spelling but green in Afrikaan), Smokey, Splat, Touchy 1&2...all the many nicknames, and mom as I ended up being called. It’s hard to explain the whole experience. Especially that night around the campfire... let’s just say it involved a lot of broken eggs and spitting “grass” across the fire. As much as this is a note letting you all know what I’ve been up to, it’s also a memoir for myself so I can look back and laugh someday. I hope I remember the smell of the fire, the awful taste of those marshmallows, the lasagna in the dark made by Mama Cook, the sound of the hyena howling through our camp, the sound of the Velcro of our tent coming up and waking up to make sure there were no animals or spiders inside, the many jokes of Kobus, the bungee jumping giraffe, the list could go on. It was truly memorable and I wish I could have a video of it in my mind forever. I hope someday I can go to the Serengeti with our guide and relive the experience again.

As always, I am sure I am forgetting a lot but I hope my pictures will serve as a memory jogger. The next day we mostly spent traveling and talking for hours on the long bus ride. While we were standing on the deck watching the sunrise, the Circle of Life and Africa played and it really was a kind of surreal experience. I felt like I was in the Lion King, and ...”I felt the rain down in Africa” ...I really did ? So right before we were going to leave, Kobus was ready to give out the pictures. He had our group nominate 6 people who we thought stood out the most. Five other people and myself were nominated, and we had to narrow that down to two people. Nathan and I were the two left standing. He was the person who missed his flight, and Kobus’ company had to go about 2 hrs to pick him up and 2 hours to bring him back. So the two of us were left, and we were told one of us would have to forfeit everything. I had no idea what that meant, but our guide told the other guy that because he was late and his company lost money, he would not get anything because he had to learn life wasn’t fair. So I was the only one left and I got to choose between the two pictures. For some reason I had a really hard time, but I chose the lion face, partly because I was the lion family for the trip, and also because it was a picture you wouldn’t see everyday...it’s very different looking, and I didn’t get to see a lion so I got to take one with me! We spent most of this day traveling as well, and I was sad to leave but I am hopeful to come back for a safari again.

In the remaining time I had left in Cape Town, one day I spent hiking Table Mountain. Look up pictures online - it is so beautiful and my pictures really don’t even do it justice. There were waterfalls and various plants and flowers and the view all the way up was spectacular. I made a short video as I was hiking up and I am quoted as saying “this is the hardest and most strenuous thing I have ever done” ...which it was. We took the most difficult path on the mountain and it was like taking three stairs at a time for an hour and a half. There was this little dog that was cruising up too, he must have been an avid hiker. I was TIRED! The top was so rewarding though. I heard this trail had the most amazing view so it made it all worth it. My lungs felt like they had doubled in size after that hike.

I was able to call home one day and speak to my mom, my dad, and Matt and it was great getting to talk to all of them. It’s weird being away from everyone and only having e-mail to communicate so it’s nice hearing people’s voices from the states. I went shopping a little bit for souvenirs for people, and also got an ostrich egg for myself! It is really awesome looking. It’s like a shimmery black and gold color with a map of Africa painted on one side and the big 5 animals painted on the other. The big 5 if you are wondering are named that because they are the most dangerous animals to hunt ...they include lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo.

The last day...yesterday...we did Operation Hunger. This was such an amazing experience and unlike anything I had ever seen. In the morning we went to a school where children are sent when their parents can’t afford to send them anywhere else. They are there from 6 in the morning til 5 in the late afternoon. They spend more time here than at home. Everyone was so excited to see us and adults and children alike wanted to shake our hands. The kids just wanted their pictures taken and to take pictures of everything. They were so friendly and so full of life. They had stickers that were given out to them and something that really amazed me is when one of the children split their sticker in half to give the other half to another child. I thought, wow they have so little and still they share. A few minutes later I saw them taking stickers off each other too, but I still saw that one moment and it was really cool to see. We had to do their heights, weights, and arm circumferences to see if they were malnourished. The ones that were too small to stand we either held them and stood on the scale, and subtracted our weight out, or we sat them on the scale cross-legged. One little girl was about 2 years old...her name was Kiarra. She couldn’t walk or stand or talk. The woman who worked there said she never smiled. I held her for an hour and she fell asleep in my arms. She was so pretty and such a cute baby but nothing could make her smile. The little kids were so excited to play with us. As I was getting ready to leave one little boy gave me a kiss on the cheek at least 15 times! They performed shows for us that they had been working on as well...anything from songs to group dances, to even ballroom dancing. It was so adorable. We were all really sad to leave. In between that and the next activity we had time to stop at a gas station to get snacks. We were given box lunches from the ship (which none of us particularly enjoy), and we got them ready to give to the children at the soup kitchen of the next place we were going. At the gas station, I bought bread, apples, bananas, cereal, and others got snacks and milk and other things as well that we brought to the soup kitchen. You should have seen the table of food after we brought everything. It was amazing. Kids were walking away with bananas, sandwiches, and eggs in their hands, when they are used to bread dipped in tea for every meal, if they are lucky. I had gotten a bag of jelly beans and walked over to a little boy to offer them. He reached in and took one and said thank you. I said no not just one, take a whole handful! He reached in and grabbed the biggest handful he could take after that, it was so cute. After leaving that place, called Capricorn, I regretted any food I had left on my plate on the ship. I told myself I would only take a small amount of food if I wasn’t sure I would like it and could always go get more. You realize that your scraps or your trash, to someone else could be a meal. No matter if you have $1 to your name, we all (you and I) have a bed to sleep in every night, a roof covering our head, food to eat, clothing to wear, shoes on our feet, running water to shower with...I am trying to appreciate my many blessings as we have more than we can count. Bad things happen all the time, but overall we truly are so lucky. If you saw a place like this you would wish you could adopt all of these people and make their lives better. So enough about that, but if there’s two things you take from this blog, one would be see the world as much as possible because it is a beautiful and amazing place, and two, take nothing for granted and share whatever you can because it has to start somewhere.

On that note, the night before that, Archbishop Desmond Tutu came on the ship to speak to us. He had actually been a guest on the ship a few years earlier as a passenger for almost 4 months. While I cannot remember exactly what I said, what I do remember is that the point he emphasized is that we are God carriers. What he meant by this is that each and every one of us is made by our Creator in His image and that doing wrong to anyone is like doing wrong to God Himself. And by supporting others, you are supporting Him who created us. We were told that we are the stand in for God, meaning we need to treat others how God would treat us. That means forgiving, accepting, and not judging, just as how we have been treated. He told us many times that we all have infinite worth and I believe it. Not every person has the same talents, or smarts, or beauty, or athletic inclination, but every person can choose to be kind to others and every person is equal and every person is special in their own way. ...And along with people coming on the ship, last night a South African choir came on the ship and it was amazing. Their voices were incredible. I hope I can find a video of it from somewhere. The last song they sang was God Bless Africa which was really great.

Overall Cape Town was an amazing city and port to dock in. As was Namibia and Africa as a whole. I did not want to leave but am confident I will come back to this continent. The city of Cape Town has a lot of contrasts, as most of the city is so beautiful and clean. There was a huge hotel right next to where we were docked and they were filming a movie called the Chairman I believe. I heard Dave Chappelle was in port while we were here also. The outer city however, away from our eye, was stricken with poverty. I’m sorry if some of my blogs come across as preachy or like I think I know so much. I do not and my eyes have only been opened through these experiences. I know I have an awesome opportunity in front of me and I am trying to appreciate and take in every moment I can. Someday these blogs and my pictures will be my only memory of this trip. I can’t believe I am going to be on this ship for another 10 days before India! I know it may not seem like much in numbers but it sure seems like a lot when you’re on it! So I think that’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed hearing about my travels in South Africa. I had so much fun and am glad to be feeling better after last night! I miss you all and hope everything is going well back home!