Rebekah cooked family dinner for us Thursday night – a delicious
meal of salmon, potatoes, and broccoli all purchased from our favorite store
Fruit and Veg City. It is only a couple
blocks away from us and has a very good array of fruits, vegetables, breads,
and meats. I go there at least twice a
week after work, while Rebekah goes pretty much every day. Later that night we went to the Kimberly
Hotel bar to watch the Spain-Ireland football match.
Friday night I met up with Emma and some other people to
attend Auma Obama’s book reading and signing.
She is our president’s half-sister and her life story was very
interesting. She grew up in Kenya and
moved to Germany for a long time. I didn’t
buy her book, “And Then Life Happens,” because it cost 250 Rand in hard cover
while the German edition was only 100 Rand in paperback. We then went back to the Kimberly Hotel to
watch the Sweden-England match because Sara is from Sweden and wanted to
support them.
For those who don’t know much about South African history, June
16 is Youth Day. It commemorates the
start of the Soweto riots of 1976. The
students protested being taught only in Afrikaans in schools not in
English. The police shot and killed many
of the children with roughly 176 people killed.
This occurred during the Apartheid era.
Saturday I got up early to go on a tourist trip with a bunch
of other interns through my program – 42 people to be exact. This is a very big crowd and my program
manager was running the event. Somehow I got stuck with checking everyone in as
we got on the bus which was difficult because I do not know everyone’s names
yet. We took the bus about 30 minutes
around Table Mountain to the other side on False Bay (as opposed to the Atlantic
Ocean). False Bay is named that because ships sailing from the Indian Ocean
would think they had reached the Atlantic coast and head north only to realize
they were wrong and the cape was still in the way. We stopped on the side of the road at a
viewing station to take pictures. We were
right over one of the beaches on False Bay on the cliffs. This is where the shark watcher sits – a
lifeguard of sorts sits all day and watches for sharks. If they see one, they notify everyone so that
they clear out of the water and hopefully don’t get attacked. There have been several recent shark attacks
including the death of a surfer in these waters. False Bay has warmer water that comes from the
Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic Ocean.
Parts of Shark Week are filmed here.
We made our next stop at Boulder’s Beach. This area is on False Bay and it is home to
many African Penguins. They all just
hang out on the beach and do whatever it is penguins do. The huge group of us scared them a little
bit, but in some areas of the beach there were quite a few of them. These penguins are only found in this area of
South Africa. We then continued on the
road to Simons Town. Here we stopped to
have lunch on the dock at Bertha’s.
Afterward we continued on into a portion of Table Mountain
National Park. We passed quite a few baboons
walking along the side of the road. The
mama baboons carry their young on their back and it is so cute. We drove out to the area where you hike to
Cape Point. I climbed all the way to the
top where the old lighthouse sits. When
it was used the lighthouse was too high and out of sight of the incoming ships
during foggy weather. There are a number
of shipwrecks along this this area of South Africa including the SS
Lusitania. They built a new lighthouse
at the end of Cape Point near the water so that it can alert all the ships
safely. It also has the highest powered bulb in South Africa. It was incredibly windy up there and really
everywhere. Cape Town is the windiest
place I have ever been. From up here you could see Cape Point in front of you
with False Bay to your left and the Atlantic Ocean to your right. The Cape of Good Hope is on the right and
Bellows Rock is out in the water – where several ships have hit and wrecked.
Rebekah and I proceeded back down the path from the old
light house to walk to the end of the Cape Point peninsula near the new
lighthouse. The path takes about 20
minutes to hike. The wind was so strong
you could barely talk to each other.
Also the path ended at a viewing point, but there was another area
further ahead that looked like it would have an even better view. So we hiked over the wall and down our own
path to get to the edge of the world.
Looking south the next land mass is Antarctica.
The bus next stopped at the Cape of Good Hope. This is the most southwesterly point in all
of Africa. Rebekah and I accidently missed the group photo shot because we had
walked away to the edge by the Atlantic Coast. We climbed along the edge to
this incredible spot where the waves crashed over the rocks. On the ride home through the national park we
drove passed a bunch of zebras walking in the flat expanse of land.
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