Location: Westbound in the Atlantic
Hey, it's me again! I am now on day 4 of the 12-day Atlantic Ocean crossing (which is the longest stretch that we will be at sea during the voyage.) Everyone is bemoaning 12 days straight of ship food, but I'm enjoying having some R&R before we get to Buenos Aires. There's an effort to make sure that we all don't get too bored (a ship full of bored college students can be a scary thing!) which includes nightly Union Seminars on all sorts of topics, and a couple of special events:
One of the biggest events we have on the ship is called the Sea Olympics, during which the ship's 7 "Seas" compete against each other at a variety of different activities, including lip-synching, synchronized swimming (I think we're all a bit curious on how those folks are going to manage in our little tiny pool on deck 7), trivia, dodgeball, and scrabble (I signed up for that, but then I realized that I'm actually very bad at scrabble. Oops.) I think I mentioned a while back that we are assigned to a particular "Sea" depending on which deck/hall our cabin located, and I am in the Caribbean Sea. For some strange reason the color that they assigned us was gray (nobody can figure out why they would make the Caribbean gray––we should be a nice aquamarine or something. The Yellow Sea got to be yellow!), and since we all must wear our sea's color while participating in the events, I am now decked out head-to-toe in gray (the Olympics start tonight!)
But why head-to-toe, you might ask? Well that is a result of the other attempt to ensure that we don't get too bored over the next 8 days––we are having a shipwide game of Assassins! Okay, so I'm going to assume that most if not all of you have never heard of this game (I hadn't, and apparently it's a thing with my generation. Who knew?) Anyhow, in the version of Assassins that we are playing everyone is assigned another player as a "target," and the object of the game is to eliminate your target by getting them alone and marking them with a washable marker while proclaiming "Assassins!" Then that person must tell you who their target was going to be, and that becomes your new target. This continues until there are just one person left, and that person is the winner. Of course you don't know which person has been assigned to assassinate you, so the best defenses are to either travel around in groups of at least three, or to make sure you have as little skin showing as possible for people to mark (you're not allowed to mark people's clothing or faces.) Since the ship is a bit cold and I tend to bundle up when I go out anyway, I think I'm going with the latter strategy.
Either way it's going to be interesting trying to get people completely alone to "assassinate" them while stuck on a ship of 800ish people! There are 258 of us are signed up to play, and the game starts this evening, so it should be really fun. I think I'm more excited about it than the Sea Olympics, but don't tell my Sea that! I've already been informed who my target will be, and I'm already trying to devise a way to get him/her alone.... hmm...
*Ahem* So, who wants to hear about the first of my five days in South Africa?
––––––– Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa: 10/26 –––––––
The evening before we pull into a port we always have a Logistical Preport meeting in the Union to discuss, well, the logistics of the upcoming port. This is where we find out more than anyone would ever want to know about all the terrible dangers and nasty diseases which could befall us in the country, as well as some of the more fun/interesting things that we may want to know about the place we will be staying. In this particular Preport, we were informed that of all the ports we would be docking at, Cape Town is one of the most beautiful to get up and watch the ship pull into. We were due to arrive between 7 and 7:30am, and sunrise was at about 6am, so it was recommended that we wake up early to catch the sunrise and then watch as the ship arrived at Cape Town.
Okay, so I'm not really a morning person (at all), and I tend to find it a bit hard to get to sleep the night before we're due to arrive at a port. But I set my alarm for 5:30, figuring that I would be up on deck by about 5:45 to catch the latter part of the sunrise and hopefully not have to wait too long before we arrived at the port. From what I gathered, my plan was shared by most of the shipboard community.
Which is why, when the ship rumbled to a stop in the harbor at about 5:40am, and we all rushed upstairs only to see the last of the pink fading from the large cloud swirling over the top of Table Mountain, there was a considerable amount of grumbling among the shipboard community. I myself was a little bit irked, but it's hard to stay that way when you realize that you have just arrived in Cape Town, South Africa.
For some reason the South African immigration people decided that we should be put through the wringer before they cleared the ship (every country has it's own fun little process for that), so we had also been informed at Logistical Preport that we would all have to get up and be ready to leave the ship at 8am, because every single person on the ship (including the crew) would have to go through the off-ship immigration building in order for the ship to be cleared, and that it would not be possible to get back on the ship until the whole process was finished several hours later.
I had just finished circling the ship to try to find a better vantage point to photograph the fading sunrise (there was a big white building blocking the best of the view from deck 6), when I heard Rita's voice come over the loudspeaker: "Would Deans Nick, Eddie, and Kathy please come to the purser's desk" ....Well, that never bodes well.
As it turned out the process had now been changed so that everyone would be called (by their Sea) to go off the ship, through the immigration process, and then back on the ship again. Then when the ship cleared we would all be allowed to actually disembark. This was announced at 6am; the process would be starting immediately. Now all the people who hadn't gotten up early to go watch the sunrise were mad too, because they suddenly had to be up at 6am instead of 8am.
All in all it was a very entertaining morning! We did eventually get everything figured out, and got off the ship at a reasonable time.
Through a series of circumstances, I had wound up with only about half of that first day in Cape Town (out of all 5 days) to have free time to explore, and as I had already decided that I did not have time to go south to Boulder Beach and see the penguin colony living there (yes, there are penguins in South Africa!) I decided that I wanted to spend it taking the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain. The only problem was, once again, finding a group that would do this with me. A large number of people were on field labs with their classes that day, still others were doing SAS field programs, and for some odd reason the rest seemed to be planning to go to the mall on the V&A waterfront. Most everyone felt that they would have time for Table Mountain at some other point in the five days that we would be in Cape Town.
I didn't actually find a group to travel with until about an hour before the ship cleared, but I did manage it! The three of us then headed out to find a taxi to take us to the cable car at the foot of the mountain (it was a bit far to walk––especially considering that I had to be back to the ship at 1:45 to meet Kenzie, who would be my traveling buddy that evening.)
The cable car station is actually situated part of the way up the mountain, and there is a nice view of Cape Town from there––which is good, because the cable car itself was closed that morning due to high winds, and we mostly hung around the base of the station and took pictures. Then we went back to town and wandered around for a little while, finally ending up in a little street market. At this point I knew I only had a little bit of time before I would need to get a taxi back to the ship, so I split off from the group and speed-walked through the market (which is actually very hard to do, because every time you try to stop and briefly look at something, the person in charge of the booth would strike up a conversation from which it is inevitably difficult to extricate yourself.) It was about 1:35 by the time I made it back to the ship, whereby I hurriedly donned my backpack and went to meet Kenzie.
Some of you are doubtlessly wondering at this point what I am up to, so I will give a brief explanation (haha, like I am capable of brevity!):
This summer, before I embarked on SAS, I was glued to the Fall 2013 facebook page (which for me is highly unusual, since I generally rarely use facebook), and I saw that a number of students were already planning independent trips in some of the countries. Many of these mimicked the SAS trips, but at a much cheaper cost (often, for example, substituting hotel for hostel accommodations.) One such trip was for a safari in South Africa's Kruger Park.
I had already looked through the pages of safaris that SAS offered, and had found myself somewhat disappointed. For one thing, most were very expensive. But more importantly, they struck me as inauthentic. Nearly all of them were to take place at private game reserves where the animals were bought and brought to the reserve for tourists to observe. Of course, the lions and other carnivores would be kept separate from herbivores like zebras and impalas (otherwise this whole circle of life thing could start to get expensive pretty fast!) Many boasted lavish-looking accommodations with swimming pools and guaranteed that visitors would get to see all of the "Big 5" (elephants, rhinos, lions, water buffalo, leopards.) All this within a couple hours drive from Cape Town!
It basically sounded like a larger version of Oregon's Wildlife Safari. I didn't want to be guaranteed to see all of the Big 5 (where's the fun in that?), and I certainly didn't want to stay in some ritzy "luxury hut" with a swimming pool. Because of this, I had pretty much decided not do any of the safaris, which was also disappointing.
Anyhow, back to the Fall 2013 facebook page. Lo and behold, someone was organizing an independent trip all the way to Kruger National Park! Kruger is South Africa's first national park, and covers about 7500 square miles on the far eastern side of the country. It is also the place to go if you want to do an actual safari in South Africa. This was the most major thing that I had planned ahead of time for my SAS trip; needless to say, I was pretty excited.
South Africa isn't exactly a small country (yes, now would be the time to go check google maps––go ahead, I'll wait.) In order to get to Kruger Park Kenzie and I would be taking a two hour plane to Johannesburg, spending the night at a hostel there with the rest of our group, and then getting picked up by a bus which would take us five hours east to the province of Mpumalanga, where we would stay at a place called Marc's Treehouse lodge and then be taken by our guide in open air jeeps to Kruger Park.
But because this post has once again become absurdly long and I'm starting to get hungry, I'm going to save the rest of that tale for another day. Cheers!
