Nov. 28, 2010
Jackie Wu shares the adventures of the men’s and women’s tennis teams from their safari in Kings Camp as well as their travel to Cape Town.
Day 5 – Happy Thanksiving: The usual wake up call at 5:30a seemed so rude yet routine to us by then. The inability to sleep because of bigger-than-normal tarantulas coupled with the fact that none of us have adjusted to South Africa time yet really just put the cherry on top of our mornings. Thank goodness for South African coffee though, right? We have all lost our sense of time since we’ve travelled out of the states without service for our phones, but luckily, I remembered that someone said yesterday was Wednesday, which means that today is Thanksgiving! We exchanged the unenthusiastic “Happy Thanksgiving” because, really, no one had really come to their senses yet.
After loading up on muffins and caffeine, we piled into our jeeps one last time. Though the weather was slightly more promising than yesterday’s (I won’t go as far as saying that it was sunny, but at least, it wasn’t terrible), the drive was not nearly as exciting as the past couple of days. We saw a couple of giraffes within a few minutes of hitting the road. We also managed to see a few adult elephants with their babies; I guess they weren’t feeling too social at that point during the morning because they continued to stomp away as our jeep got closer and closer. Cynet started to back away and explained that in this particular circumstance, it is best not to disturb the animals because they are clearly agitated by their surroundings. Unfortunately, we really didn’t see anything else for the remainder of the two-hour driveâ€â€ÂI suppose the animals were on their Thanksgiving break as well.
We returned to the lodge for another wonderful breakfast. As we enjoyed our last drop of coffee and last bite of the amazing oak smoked haddock, we all scurried back to our rooms to do some last minute packing in our to hop on the buses shuttling us to the airport in Nelspruit. I packed up some brochures about Kings Camp and made sure that I had gotten all of my essentials before sentimentally saying goodbye to the giant spiders and the outdoor shower. I’ll be the first to admit that I fell asleep right away once we loaded up the buses and departed from Kings Camp. I was woken up by a persistent poking of my arm, opening my eyes only to find the one and only Aleke telling me to “take it all in.” I stared out the window for a while, taking pictures and just being in complete awe of the differences between the states and South Africa. We passed by houses that didn’t have roofs, witnessed people who walked the gravel streets barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes, and just marveled at the overall beauty of the landscape and the freedom that everyone fought so hard to achieve.
Our flight to Capetown was approximately two and a half hours long. Some of us chose to do school work while others chose to put on those noise-cancelling headphones and fall asleep to the sweet sound of Tim McGraw. When we landed, we were greeted by our new tour guide and taken to reclaim our checked luggage. Our schedule had changed a little bitâ€â€Âoriginally we were going to take cable cars up Table Mountain, but due to the excessive wind, they closed down the cars for the day. We took a quick bus tour of the city, passing several monuments along the way. When we arrived at the hotel, we were greeted by a more-than-friendly hotel staff who provided us with refreshments and our room keys. To describe the rooms and views as breathtaking would be robbing them of their actual magnificence. On one side, the rooms faced the water, and on the other side, the rooms offered a view of the dock and the mountains in the background.
Because we had a little time before dinner, a few of us went to walk around the mall while others struggled with connecting onto the internet. Within 30 minutes, several of us had updated our Facebook statuses to just to rub it in the rest of the world’s face that we were in South Africa and they weren’t. Showered and dressed to impress, we strolled down by the peer and took our seats at 3 long tables in a Greek restaurant. Several hours later, we were stuffed and eventually surrendered ourselves to a food coma, in preparation for tomorrow.
How to describe Capetown in a word… Amazing? Spectacular? Extraordinary? I don’t even know. Make the trip and decide for yourself. I promise you, you won’t regret it.
