On a few different lunch breaks last week, Jim and I wandered over to Greenmarket square, the square where all the vendors are, and bought some random things, mostly gifts for people. Not only is everything a lot cheaper after the World Cup, but the vendors are much more flexible in bargaining. When they don’t seem like they’re going to budge on a price, I like to ask them to throw some other random object into the deal, so I’ve ended up with some zebra-headed salad tongs, a beaded peacock keychain, and some South Africa flag themed earmuffs.
On Friday night, Jim, David and I went to this Asian Fusion Restaurant on our street called the Opal Lounge, which has been listed as the “most beautiful restaurant in Cape Town.” It really is gorgeous on the inside, with very interesting various rooms. I was looking for the Ladies’ Room at one point and entered the ‘Peacock Lounge,” which sounded promising, only to walk into a room which a bunch of jungle-themed furniture where two men were sitting on a couch smoking cigars and looking at me in surprise. Oops! The menu was also really interesting, and the food was delicious. My butternut squash soup had some kind of coconut ice cream on the top of it, and it contained something called “lemon air” which I’m still not entirely clear on.
On Saturday morning, Jim and I set off at 8 am to catch a boat to Robben Island, the island where Nelson Mandela was kept as a political prisoner for 18 years.
There were HUGE swells as we headed off there (the island is 12 km off the mainland), and being on the boat felt kind of like being on a roller coaster, with your stomach dropping every couple of sections. When we got to island, we were herded onto a bunch of buses that were waiting, and were then taken on an hour-long guided bus tour of the island.
View from Robben Island looking back toward Cape Town:
We had an Indian-South African tour guide who thought he was pretty darn hilarious, making all sorts of very un-PC jokes throughout the tour. My favorite was one where he asked why India wasn’t good at soccer, and then said it’s because everytime they get to a corner of the field, they set up a shop instead of taking a shot. We passed a “Leper Graveyard,” a cannon that was built to protect the Cape Town harbor during WWII but that wasn’t finished until 1947, and the island’s ambulance (even though there was never a hospital on the island).
We finally got to the prison, and we got a tour of the prison from a former inmate. There was some very rude Zimbabweans who were just talking all throughout the inmate-guide’s descriptions and taking pictures of each other grinning and smiling outside the prison, in front of jail cells, etc. At one point when the guide was telling us about the institutionalized favoritism of coloured’s over blacks in the prison (yes, they say “coloured” in South Africa) and the ID cards that they used to have to carry, someone’s baby escaped from its parents and crawled over to the guide and basically started crawling up his leg, while the guide just tried to ignore the baby until someone came and retrieved it. I couldn’t tell whether or not I was allowed to laugh at this.
View of prison yard:
Our tour guide:
View of the prison:
We all headed back to the buses and then got on the ship to head back to Cape Town. I wanted to sit on top of the boat for the way back, and I was fighting with some little kids to get a seat. I eventually let one kid have my seat because I felt like a bad person, but then a guy came up and said there was a “32 kilogram requirement” to sit on the top (I guess so little kids don’t fly off the boat?) and ordered the kid to go downstairs to the lower deck. He was crying about it to his mother who was trying to convince the staff member that he was actually 40 kilogram, which was CLEARLY not true, so he eventually had to go. HAH! So I got his seat and got some GREAT views of the Cape Town harbor with Table Mountain and Lion’s Head in the background on our way back in.
Jim and I met up with David for lunch at this Italian place, which was kind of in a mall complex that was hosting a “Ubuntu festival.” This appeared to consist of people having a cook-off on some skillets and other people finger-painting on a big white piece of paper in the middle of the mall. The best part about it was that one of the guys finger-painting had a sports jacket on with the last name “FARTMILL” on the back. That is a REALLY unfortunate name. David, Jim and I maturely laughed about it for about 5 minutes.
After lunch we headed over to the East Corridor to the District Six Museum, a museum about (and sort of for) the previous residents of “District 6,” an area in Cape Town that was declared a “white area” under the Group Areas Act in 1966 and then razed & reconstructed, forcing 70,000 to move from the inner city to separate townships determined by their race. It was a really cool little museum with lots of interesting art pieces.
There’s this one huge map that an artist made that covers the floor of the main room, and ex-residents have been able to sign their names and previous addresses on the map.
I left the boys who were going to do some souvenir shopping, and was walking back to our hotel when I tried to take a shortcut. I was walking along and I heard someone behind me say “sorry.” Then a little louder- “SORRY.” I really didn’t think anyone was talking to me, but when I heard the guy shout “SORRY” extremely loudly and realized there was no one else around, I turned around to find this very alarmed looking guard. Apparently I was trespassing through the grounds of Parliament, and the guard thought the best way to get my attention was to shout SORRY at me until I got the idea. Oops. Well, upon taking the long way around the grounds of Parliament, I got to see this lovely sight:
I mean, who wouldn’t want to put a giant cow statue on their house?
The next day, Sunday, we were signed up with a company called SHARK ZONE to take a trip to Gaansbai, a place about two hours down the coast, and then out in a boat to “Shark Alley,” the Great White Shark capital of the world to go shark cage diving. This basically involves jumping into a steel cage that is attached to the boat and floating on the surface with buoys and swimming underwater to the see Great Whites that are around the boat. When I called on Saturday to confirm everything and see if we could add one more person (David) to our group, the lady kept agreeing with me by saying “happy day,” and “happy happy.” I took that as a good sign.
So at 5:30 on Sunday morning, we were picked up in a minivan containing a bunch of other tourists, and we drove to Gaansbai. We had breakfast at a little place right by the water, signed our lives away to Shark Zone, and then we all hopped onto a waiting boat. We had heard from Hirsh, who had already done this trip with a different company, that almost everyone got seasick on the way out to Shark Alley because the swells were so high. It was an EXTREMELY lurchy ride out there, but I felt ok. On our way out we saw a southern right whale breaching not too far away from our boat—you can kind of see it in this picture:
About an hour and half later, we parked the boat right by a small island where thousands of seals live (this is why the Great Whites hang out there, poor seals ☹ ). The staff started “chumming the water” (ew) and after getting a safety talk, we hung out and waited for the sharks.
After a while, someone spotted one, and this huge shark circled the boat for a little while. We had learned from a very educational video playing in the van on the way to Gaansbai that Great Whites are very curious animals, like dogs, and they usually come up to boats not so much because they are hungry and want to eat the chum/the people on the boat, but because they’re curious about what the boat is doing in their territory. The staff people had this huge tuna head (gross) tied onto a sort of buoy that was then attached to a long rope, and they were constantly flicking it around in the water to attract the sharks. Throughout the day the sharks would come up to it and rise out of the water to bite at the tuna head, and then the Shark Zone people would pull it out of the way at the last minute so you’d just see the shark jumping out of the water baring its teeth. PRETTY AWESOME.
There were about 30 of us, and groups of 5 took turns going into the diving cage. The group right before us had an AMAZING dive; we were standing on the boat right by the cage all suited up in wet suits, and there were sharks literally jumping and biting at the cage because they were kind of dragging the large disgusting tuna head all over the bars of the cage.
Us before getting in the cage:
Unfortunately, right when it was our group’s turn to hop into the freezing cold water (David, Jim, two Canadians we met and myself), the sharks seemed to discover something better to do and hightail it away from the boat. So we bobbed in the freezing cold water in our wet suits and diving masks, waiting for sharks to come along. I think the scariest part of the whole thing was making sure that all of your limbs were always tucked properly into the cage; there were these certain inner bars that you were supposed to hook your feet under to keep you in one spot, because the wet suits were really buoyant, but I was too short to reach the bottom bar unless I was completely underwater, so I had an interesting time trying to figure out where to put all of my limbs while we were waiting for sharks to come.
About to get into the cage:
Us climbing down into the cage:
View from inside the shark cage:
The water was REALLY cold; the wet suit kept most of my body pretty warm, but my hands and feet (even though I was wearing these kind of diving shoes) were FREEZING. About 20 minutes later we heard someone yelling about a shark, and they yelled to us “DOWN, RIGHT!” which meant swim under water and look to your right. We did so, and I saw a huge shark swim right by the cage on our right. The image of that shark’s HUGE eyeball looking us over will be forever planted in my mind. Apparently that shark swam around us for a little while longer, but we couldn’t get any other good views of it. Finally I was so cold that I had to get out, and they took the rest of the boys out a few minutes later because it was getting to be around 3:30 and we had to head back to shore. After squeezing myself out of the wet suit I saw that my face and hands were completely white, and someone said my lips were actually blue, so I went in and took a hot shower in the lower deck to try to regain the feeling in my extremities. After getting dressed again, I realized I was REALLY not feeling well- the combination of te freezing cold water, being in a lurch-y boat all day, and swallowing a good amount of chum-filled seawater (EW) was really not working for me. David and I both got sick and then spent the ride back head in hands outside of the bathroom in the lower deck. When I got back to shore, I felt much better, and we had lunch with the whole group at the same place where we had had breakfast, and watched a DVD of footage that one of the staff members had taken throughout the day. Then we got loaded up in the vans and headed back to Cape Town, stopping on the way to catch some views of Hermanus, on Cape Whale Coast, which is considered best land-based-whale-watching destination in the world. I was EXHAUSTED when we got back and immediately passed out.
Today at work we had a 2 hour staff meeting in the morning, during which we learned that ODAC has made the decision to fire their IT company, “Dial-a-Nerd.” It doesn’t really surprise me, because the internet is out practically every other day, but I will miss those guys wearing their “Dial-a-Nerd” embroidered uniforms.
Over and out,
Cary.
ohh I just figured out how to comment! I LOVE your blog and after reading about your shark dive I realize that YOU were the one in a cage, not the sharks, and therefore your shark diving excursion is officially 1 million times scarier and in turn, cooler that I thought. I laughed out loud for a good 35 seconds when I read the entry about you wiping out in the middle of the road and about the Happy Lady throwing away your deodorant. Sounds like you are having a blast! So glad you decided to do this :) you are very cool.
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