Weekend at the Cape

Hi friends - I am exhausted.  This week I have suffered from massive jet lag!  I am usually pretty good about getting back into the swing of things, even after a very long trip, but for some reason, this week I have been SO incredibly tired and unable to sleep at night!  It must be my old age.. you know, now that I am 30 and all..

Anyway, I want to tell you all about my trip to Capetown!  It was so so so much fun.  Capetown is a really great city.  I had really high expectations (my friend Stephanie, who has basically been everywhere, lists Capetown in her top five cities in the entire world), and I was not disappointed!!

We flew over on Friday morning, and the weather was sunny and gorgeous.  Capetown is really unique in that it has gorgeous waterfront scenery and mountains all right next to each other.  Makes for some great views and lots to do!  We grabbed some lunch on the V&A Waterfront and walked around the shops and enjoyed the mild weather and the beautiful area.

Look at that gorgeous sky

Lots to do at the V&A Waterfront!

Cape Union Mart - kind of like REI.  The Rand is so low against the dollar that we ended up coming back here again and again :)

Lunchtime!

Oysters!

I love love love to see boats

As it got close to sunset, we went up to this mini London Eye/Singapore Flyer.  It was only 80 ZAR, which is about 8 USD, so we figured we might as well!

Sunset in Capetown

Great view of Table Mountain and the wharf below

The other side of the view

Shortly after our 12 minute ride, it was dark.

We spent the rest of our evening at a local brewery pub just hanging out and playing cards.

We called it a fairly early night because we had a big day ahead of us!  Saturday morning we hiked up Table Mountain!  This was definitely the highlight of the trip for me.  I love to hike, and this was an absolutely great hike.  Nice climb, great guide, fun people, perfect weather.

Water and snacks packed!  We are ready!

View from the bottom.. check out that blue sky!

Our guide was an Italian named Pietro who had lived in South Africa for years, and we had a German couple hiking with us too - we were a pretty international group!  We went up the back side of the mountain, on a trail called the Skeleton Gorge.  The hike started in a botanic garden.. beautiful paved walkways and flora and fauna on a gradually upward sloping hill.  But pretty soon, the gradual slope started to get sharper and sharper.. and then there were some stairs.. lots of stairs.. and then there were tons of rocks to scale and ladders to climb. The first two hours were a pretty challenging (for me) hike.  I loved it!!

A little cloudy, but so far, so good

Starts to get steeper as we get into the woodier areas

Ugh.. steps up the mountain

More steps

Ladders to climb!

Beautiful green trees.. Capetown was full of color

More ladders!

Stephanie leads the way up some rocks

We hiked and hiked, and finally, we reached a high clearing, and I thought we were finished!  In reality, we still had almost three hours of hiking to go.  Haha.  Luckily, the rest of the climb wasn't nearly as tough as the first half.  We did a bit more climbing, but we also walked across the "top" of Table Mountain (the flat part that you can see in the pictures) in order to get to the other side.  There was still definitely some tougher parts, but the first half was definitely much more difficult than the second half.

Hi!

Highest point

We made it up to the highest point on Table Mountain, which is 1085 meters (3560 feet) high.  Took tons of pictures.  Ate some snacks.  Drank in all the views.  Basked in the blue sky and chased clouds.  It was amazing.

View from the top

 

The city below.. looks so tiny

The weather got pretty cloudy as we were walking across the top, so we didn't get to see much of the water from the top of the mountain.  We made it over to the other side, and then we took a cable car ride down.  (You can also take the cable car up the mountain if you don't want to hike it!)  It was a great Saturday.

My pants look too short

On Sunday, we were up early (again!) to go on another fun activity!!

We did a bicycle winery tour!

The weather was a bit dicey (it was raining during our first leg of the bike ride), but it was still good fun.  For those of you who don't know, I crashed my bike a couple of years ago, so I don't do much riding anymore.  But it was so fun being back on the bike!  We rode through the vineyards in the Constatia region, which is the oldest wine region in South Africa.

We stopped at some vineyards along the way and did our share of learning and tasting..

I fell off my bike (twice haha), but it was such a great time!  Definitely a great way to do a wine tasting and get in some exercise.  The scenery was beautiful even though it was cloudy, and it stopped raining after the first winery, so it turned out to be a pleasant day for a casual bike ride.  Since many wineries are not open on Sundays in South Africa, they were all pretty empty, so it was nice to have most of them all to ourselves.

Monday came way too soon (as it always does), and we left Capetown to head back to normal life.  As I mentioned at the top of this post, I've had a hard time adjusting this week, but luckily, it is already Thursday night!  Tomorrow we have a fun celebration planned at work for something special, and I have plans to go wakeboarding this weekend as well!  Should be fun :)  And just to be a broken record - can you believe that it is basically June already?!

Two days in Johannesburg

Hey friends - I just got back from South Africa this morning.  What a trip!  I loved it all, but I was struggling to stay awake at work today.  Came home and took a short nap, and hopefully my internal clock will be ok with the time change!

I'm going to break this trip into two separate posts because honestly, there is just so much to share.  We spent two days in Johannesburg (Stephanie was working there), and then we headed over to Capetown for a long weekend.  The thing that surprised me most was how different the two cities were from each other.. Johannesburg, at least the bit we saw, still seems very much like a foreign country, whereas Capetown could've been any major metropolis.

We flew overnight on Tuesday to Johannesburg.  The flight is about 11 hours, and the time change is six hours, so it was Wednesday morning when we landed.  A quick stop to our hotel (Emperor's Palace, which actually labels itself "The Vegas of Africa"), and we were off on our first tour.  I booked this one last minute because we had a free day in Johannesburg, and I didn't think it was a good idea for us to go "exploring" without a guide.  South Africa, even the major cities, is not known for safety..

Our tour guide, Agnes, was a white woman (born in Holland and raised in South Africa) in a white Mercedes Benz.  She took us to a township called Soweto, which is a large black community in Johannesburg.

These two towers used to be the cooling stations that supplied electricity to neighboring Johannesburg.  Soweto actually didn't get electricity all over the city until something startlingly recent.. in the 90s I think?  Crazy, right?

One thing I've really learned since I started doing all these travels is that I know so so so little about the rest of the world.  I had a friend in high school who was from South Africa, and I actually took a half semester course in college about the white settlement in South Africa, but I was still shockingly under-educated about a lot of the things Agnes told us about or showed us.  Agnes told us that Johannesburg is about 3 million people, and Soweto is about 3.5 million.  Of the 3.5 million people living in Soweto, Agnes estimates about 80 of them are white.  Eighty.  Out of 3.5 million.  Wow.

We also went to a shantytown called Kliptown.  We stopped at some sort of charity youth program thing.  I was a bit surprised by this, since usually when you pay people to take you on a tourist activity, it doesn't include charity stuff.  Is that a terrible thing to say?  I guess Angelina Jolie and all those other humanitarians do this sort of stuff all the time, but I was really surprised that this stop was part of our tour.  Does that make me awful?  Perhaps, ha.

Anyway, the youth program thing was alright or whatever, but what was shocking was the shantytown itself. Apparently, this sort of housing was all erected back during the segregation and Apartheid era, and it still houses a lot of people.

Water sources are all communal.  People come and wash their clothes and chat with one another.

A few families will share something similar to a block

Houses are made of corrugated steel.. our guide told us that people use things like billboards, so long as it is strong enough to sustain the storms.

Really puts it into perspective, huh?

The houses are known as "matchbox" houses because you can line them all up like matchboxes.  Kind of makes me feel badly about thinking my apartment in Singapore is small...

After Kliptown, we headed over towards the Nelson Mandela home, which has been restored to a museum.  Everyone freaking loves Nelson Mandela - black people, white people, everyone!  Interestingly, the street where Nelson Mandela's home is also includes Desmond Tutu's home.  Two Nobel Peace Prize winners living on the same street.  No other street in the world can claim that!

The home itself was small and just full of all kinds of memorabilia.  The part I found most interesting was to learn about his family.. his wives and his children.

After lunch, our day of culture and history continued at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg.  This museum was full of information, and I felt like it could have been really, really good, but the layout was totally confusing.  One minute I would be looking at stuff from the 1930s, the next I would be in 1990, and then the next I would be in 1950.  It was confusing.  But still very informative.  No pictures were allowed, so this is the only one I got!

After our day of exploring, we had a pretty low key night since we had to get up early the next day.  We got picked up for our day safari at the crack of dawn, and then our guide (a black man who's name none of us could pronounce) drove us the 2.5 hours to Pilanesburg Game Reserve!

It was really interesting to hear our white tour guide and our black tour guide talk about things.  There were no direct contradictions in the things they said, but it was definitely just.. different.  Hard to describe I guess.

Anyway - check out these animals!!!

Hi!

These might be ostriches with their heads down?  I took so many pictures, I actually have no idea haha.

Cruising through the park

Springboks.. these are the mascot of the SA rugby team

Wildebeasts down by the water

This zebra just stopped and stared at our car for a while.. totally awesome

Straight chillin

Bye!

Giraffe!!!

Mom and baby rhino crossing the road!

More rhinos 

More giraffes

Those lumps along the water are hippos.. too far away to get a good shot :(

We didn't see any elephants, which I was super sad about, and the only lion we saw was waaayyyy too far away and sleeping.  So that was also sad, but the safari was absolutely incredible.  I took a billion pictures, but after a while, it was nice to just sit back and enjoy nature.  The game reserve was incredibly peaceful and beautiful.  So different from the concrete chaos of Singapore!

After the safari, we headed back into town and just had an easy night of beers and Uno to wind down before heading off to Capetown on Friday morning.  More to come on that!  I've got kind of a busy week, and I'm struggling with jet lag a bit, but hopefully I'll get my next post up before the weekend.  Some friends are in town this weekend to celebrate some birthdays, so it should be a good time, but I want to be fully rested before Friday!!

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day holiday!