Eric and I had a fabulous trip in Cape Town and back along the Garden Route. I got in on Monday night (Mar 19^th), after a very boring but otherwise uneventful 12 hour greyhound ride. They showed Spanglish (decent), then Runaway Bride (blech) and then Patch Adams (meh), and you really have no choice but to watch because they play the sound over the bus speakers. Anyway, we stayed at Castle backpackers while in CT, which was alright, if you don’t mind a few cockroaches and a middling neighborhood. I guess I wouldn’t stay there again unless everything else available sounded worse. They did have nice laundry services. On Tuesday we went to the Castle (which is really more of a fort) and saw the key ceremony and the firing of the cannon. It sounds more exciting than it was; the cannon was very small and hard to see. The castle itself was nice; it was built by the Dutch when they arrived in the mid-1600’s. They have a gigantic table in the dining hall, and it’s easy to imagine throwing huge dinner parties there.  The English took the castle over from the Dutch about a hundred years later, much to their dismay. After the Castle we went to the District Six museum, which is a museum about the horrific and widespread racist policies which were in place in the sixties until the early 90’s. These include completely uprooting black communities (like District Six) and moving them into Townships such as the Cape Flats, where they were crowded and lawless and denied basic human rights. Also, black Africans had to carry passes with them at all times and were restricted from certain areas, kept from jobs, all sorts of really horrible things. It’s like if someone had bulldozed Shanahan Ridge and moved everyone who lived there out into the plains east of Boulder and told them that they could no longer work in the city and the area would not be provided with water or electricity. Awful. The situation is hardly remedied, but progress is being made on integration.

            After the museum, we wandered around Long Street, which is the street with the highest concentration of backpackers in the city. We ate lunch at Mama Africa, which reminded me of SAS since Amber and Emily (or was it Steve and Adam? anyway, someone I met on the ship) mentioned to Carrie and I that they had eaten there while in CT. It was great, I had an ostrich kabob. I’m a great fan of ostrich and kudu, but South Africans in general eat way too much meat for my diet. I’m much more of a grain and veggies girl. Still, when the meat is so good, it’s hard to turn down.

That evening we went to the Victoria and Alfred waterfront, which is where Carrie and I spent a lot of our time in CT when we were there. I love the waterfront, it’s just so beautiful I should add that Cape Town is one of the most beautiful and interesting cities that I have ever visited, and more than almost any other it feels like Home to me. It’s hard to explain, but I felt the same way when I was there 6 years ago. Maybe it’s the mountains and the ocean, maybe it’s the similarity to San Francisco (the other place besides Boulder which exudes that home-comfort feeling), but something draws me to Cape Town and makes it easy for me to imagine living there. Of course, all of these locations also share the unfortunate characteristic of being expensive relative to their surroundings. Here in Addo, Eric and I can both eat a good dinner (dessert and drinks and everything) for under 20$. Cape Town, its 25-30$. Considering we spend 50-80$ for the same dinner in the states, it’s not really “expensive”, but relatively so. Anyway, we went to see The Last King of Scotland that night, and it was pretty good, if disturbing and sad.

            On Wednesday we hiked up Table Mountain, which is by far the hardest hike I have ever done.  It’s not the length, but the incline. We went up 600meters in under 2km, so it was basically like 2km of high stairs. I felt like dying several times, and was stopping every 5 minutes or so by the end, but I made it. Eric of course could have done much better w/o me, but I’m just not much of a hiker. I like walking, but not really hiking. Or I guess I should say I like easy hiking, and I really don’t like hiking w/ people who are better than me because I feel bad for holding them up. It didn’t help my case that we walked from our backpacker in the center of town to the start of the hike, which definitely added some km and incline to the hike. The view from the top is spectacular, but food up there is very expensive and not very good, but we had no choice but to eat it since we’d planned our day doing that. We took the cable car back down, thankfully, because I probably would have fallen down the mountain if we’d tried to hike it, and also clouds came rolling in just as we were coming down in the cable car so we would have had to hike down in the mist, which is very dangerous. We had an easy night, since we were both tired from the hike.

            On Thursday we went to Robben Island, which is the island prison where many political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela) were held during apartheid. It was pretty neat to see the island, in a lot of ways it reminded me of Alkatraz in SF bay, but probably mostly because that’s the only other island prison I’ve ever toured. The prisoners in Alkatraz were legitimate bad guys, where as the Robben Island prisoners were more people who fought the system to try and make things better. Though not all of them; they also had a section for normal prisoners. It’s also a much larger island than Alkatraz, and there were blackfooted penguins living on it, which was really cool. One of the neatest aspects of the tour was that all of the guides were prisoners on the island, so you get a more personal explanation of the prison. After our Robben Island tour, we hung out in the V&A Waterfront for awhile, and then saw Babel at the movie theatre below the internet café where I checked my e-mail 6-years ago in Cape Town. We checked our e-mail there this time as well, even though it’s comparatively expensive so we didn’t stay long. Babel was decent, but none of the characters are really that well developed. I think it encapsulated globalization well, however, and how cultures can clash even when everyone just wants to get along. I really didn’t think the story of the Japanese girl added anything to the movie, however.

            On Friday we left Cape Town and Eric had the fun experience of driving us down to Cape Point in our rental car. He adjusted pretty quickly to driving on the wrong side of the road, especially considering he had to do it in the middle of a city, whereas I had a relatively empty national park to practice in. On our way out to the point, we stopped at Boulder’s beach to see more penguins. Unfortunately, they now charge 25rand (4$) to go to the actual beach, and we were too cheap to shell out for it. We did see a lot of penguins in the area though, so it was still a nice experience.  They also charge an entrance fee for Cape Point National park (even though it’s part of Table Mountain national park and Table Mountain itself is free, so I don’t really understand their reasoning), but we decided to shell out for this one, since we’d driven all the way down the coast to see it. It really was gorgeous, if a little tourist-heavy. After walking the short (and easy, compared to Table Mountain) hike to the lighthouse, we turned around and headed off to Stellenbosch and the wine region of South Africa. Stellenbosch is a completely and absolutely lovable in every possible way. It’s an adorable little college town, easily walkable, with hundreds of great wineries all around the area. We checked into our backpacker (the Stumble Inn, which was almost as cute as the name, even though the other guests didn’t really understand that if you’re talking in the courtyard outside someone’s open window at 3am, you’re bound to wake them up), and wandered around a bit before having an amazing dinner at this little restaurant that had just opened. I had crocodile for the first time, and it was actually really good. Eric had had it before and hadn’t really liked it, but this one was prepared really nicely and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

            On Saturday we did a tour of the wineries recommended in our Rough Guide. We’d thought about doing a pre-arranged tour, but they’re expensive and we had the rental car so we might as well put it to good use. It was a good decision, since the wineries we chose were all really nice. The first one (Rustenberg) was small and quaint, and they had these awesome tasting glasses where the wine went into the stem of the glass, so you could actually roll it along the bar instead of swirling it to get it properly oxygenated. My favorite winery however was the Fairview estate (not because it was named after my high school; ) because they had goats there! And not just goats, a goat tower, which the goats hung out in. Seriously, it was awesome. Not surprisingly, they are the winery which produces the Goats Do Roam label, which is quite popular in the states (my parents frequently drink it because they’re fans of goofy puns). I tried to get my parents a shirt from Fairview winery, but they were all sold out of adult sizes! I guess my parents aren’t the only ones who like silly puns on wine. But all goofy-goatness aside, it’s actually really decent wine. Also, they make their own cheese, and for your 15 rand you get 6 wine tasting’s and unlimited cheese tasting. The cheese was really really good, yummy. They also have a nice café-restaurant, and it’s just a great, pleasant place to drink lots of wine and eat lots of cheese and relax. We also went to two other wineries, but those weren’t as memorable Rustenberg and Fairview. By the end of the day I was a little tipsy and somewhat tired of wine, but it was way more fun than I would have ever expected to have on do-it-yourself wine tour. We went to bed early after all that wine.

            On Sunday we had to say goodbye to Stellenbosch as we made our way back towards P.E. We drove along what’s known as “The Garden Route”, which is this really beautiful tract of the N2 along the coast, dotted with cute little beach towns. We decided to stay in one of these towns called Mossel Bay, in a backpacker which was actually an old train parked literally on the beach.  It’s called the Santos Train, and while it sounds really cool, in actuality train compartments are TEEENY and the beds in them are even smaller. I hardly slept at all because every time I fell asleep I’d wake with a jolt because I was falling out of the bed. Eric and I are not very large people, so I can’t imagine how someone Ian’s size could sleep there, let alone how other couples who stay there manage. I guess they mean it when they say “single” beds. Still, it was cool to hear the ocean outside the window.

            The only remarkable things about the remaining two days of our drive back were the beach in Wilderness, MonkeyLand, and watching Eric throw himself off a bridge. The town of Wilderness is somehow the most beautiful of the beautiful beach towns between The Western Cape and the Eastern Cape. I don’t know why it enchanted me so much, but it was truly lovely. Monkeyland is a primate sanctuary near Titsikamma national park, and you can see the monkeys for free from their deck, so that was neat. And then early Tuesday morning Eric did the Bloukrans bungy jump (which is the highest bungy jump in the world) for the second time in his life. It was really really high, and it was scary enough for me just watching him jump off the bridge. The view from the bridge is lovely, over a gigantic ravine leading out to the ocean. Then we drove the remaining few hours back to P.E. and ran errands before heading back to Addo around sunset. I was somewhat anxious to get back to my elephants, though it’s always hard to end a good vacation.

            I can’t believe that was almost a month ago now, and now I’m getting ready for our next big Africa vacation to Victoria Falls. We’ve had lots of experiences here in Addo (poker night at the OE, a run-in while cooking dinner with the larger older brother of the rain/baboon spider who thinks he lives in my wendy, just to name a few), and now Eric is off again doing his research. I’m meeting him in Joburg at the end of the week, and next we head up to Zambia for 5 days. I’m excited about it, if a little anxious because after that trip it’s less than 2 weeks until Eric heads back to the states and I face my final 2 months here, which in many ways may be more stressful than the first 4. Amazingly, my poster was accepted at the Society for Conservation Biology conference in P.E. at the beginning of July, which means I have to actually have data to put in a poster. This makes me a little anxious. It’s one thing to spend my days collecting data on my elephants, but it’s quite another to feel the pressure that I have to actually be able to SAY something about them for my poster (not to mention my masters thesis) when this is all over. I think I should be fine, but nonetheless it does make me jittery when I think about it too much. But for now, I hope to enjoy Livingstone and Victoria Falls and my last weeks with Cheetah.