Hello Everyone!
Sorry I haven’t written in a few days! Things have been pretty busy around here and I was out of Cape Town for the past two days so I have a lot to write about. Let’s start back at Friday…
In the morning, I got to go and visit my service learning site to work for the first time. I spent three hours at Philani Child Health and Nutrition in the township of Khayelitsha. The morning was very hectic as everyone important in the NGO has meetings on Fridays. As a result, we were sent to work right away and told we would meet with the director later. Jenny and I were sent off to weigh the children in the preschool that is run here. It was really fun to see all of the 4 and 5 year old kids behave just the same as any in the United States. All but one of the children had a good weight for their age. It gave me hope that Philani is really making a difference in the communities. After we were done weighing the children and plotting their weights on a graph, we went to go see the director of the NGO. Unfortunately, she still was not in and she had quite an excuse. She was meeting with Desmond Tutu. I figured that was an ok reason to be late to work. We were sent to entertain the children and give the teachers a little break and then finally after our transport was already there, we got into a meeting with the director. In our meeting we found out that we would be working in their remote clinics which are run on Tuesdays and helping with weighing of children and preparing patients for the doctor. I’m so excited that I get to work in a clinic because it was exactly what I was hoping to do this quarter. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as things move forward, but for now the plan is that I’ll go in on Tuesday!
The rest of Friday was taken up with ultimate Frisbee up at UCT and preparing for my weekend trip. A group of ten people rented a couple of cars for the weekend to drive along the southern coast of Africa. The main destinations were De Hoop Nature Preserve and Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa.
We left Saturday morning for the 4ish hour drive to De Hoop. For about the last hour we were driving on dirt roads in our rental cars desperately hoping that flying rocks wouldn’t dent the car or a pothole wouldn’t do something worse. We got there fine though and spent the afternoon in probably the most beautiful place I’ve been in quite awhile. First we stopped and made sandwiches for lunch right next to this awesome tree that would serve as quite the treehouse. We quickly jumped into the tree and began climbing around. It fit 5 of us comfortably. We kept climbing around until a man from the hotel came out and told us that there had been boomslangs, venomous snakes, living in the tree. We weren’t sure if he was kidding or if he was telling the truth, but we decided it was a good idea to get out of that tree anyways. We hiked around the visitor’s center a little bit and saw ostriches, zebras, and some impala relatives.
After that, we got back into our car and drove a little further on to the coast which was one of the highlights of the trip. From where we parked we had two options in front of us. Turning right led us to several miles worth of sand dunes while turning left led us by an even longer distance of tide pools. All of this was set on the edge of the Indian Ocean which was surprisingly warm. It was so gorgeous. I’ll try to post pictures tomorrow showing the views, but it was absolutely stunning. We opted to first try out the sand dunes. Each of us took our turns rolling down them. The sand was so smooth and it was incredible how vast the dunes were. After we were tired of running up and down the dunes, we went to check out the tide pools on the other side. They were equally as entertaining. The tide was coming in though so it was hard to venture very far out into the water. In fact, as I was wading at one point, a really large wave came in and got me soaking wet. Fortunately it was warm out and the wind dried me off relatively quickly. As the tide came in it was really cool to watch the spray off the rocks. Some of it went up to 30 feet in the air!
As the park was about to close, we drove off to our hostel in Cape Agulhas for the night. Most of us were tired, so we grabbed food at a local restaurant and then went to sleep. In the morning, we woke up leisurely and enjoyed some eggs for breakfast before heading to the southernmost tip of Africa. There was a little monument set up there to indicate the southernmost tip, though there were lots of rocks just offshore that I might count those as farther south. It just gave me an excuse to climb out as far as I could. We drove a little farther down the road to a shipwreck just off the coast. The water was filled with rocks and there were more tide pools here as well. They were much more interesting because the tide was lower and more had washed up on shore. There were tons of abalone shells, some coral, sea sponge, kelp, jellyfish, crabs, small fish, snails, and things that looked like small Portuguese Man’o’wars. We spent quite awhile exploring all the different tide pools and taking pictures of the ship that had washed onto the rocks.
After our time there, we began the drive back and took some smaller roads back. We stopped at a town called Stanford for lunch and we traveled by Danger Point (which was boring), Pearly beach (which was more like kelp beach), and Hermanus (which looked like a really nice beach) on our way back to Cape Town. We got back just in time for dinner and now I’m just relaxing writing this up.
Whew! Done with the last three days. I hope that catches you up. It’s time for me to get some sleep…
Tim
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