Bye bye Cape Town for the next four days (Fri 06/26)

I’m having mixed feelings about leaving at this point. Part of me is definitely excited for a change and anxious to see more parts of SA, but another part of me is getting pretty attached to the area. I’ll be fine, don’t worry. Just thought it was interesting that I’m finally developing some sort of bond to the town.

So of course, because we’re traveling as a group, for some reason that requires us waking up waaaaaaay earlier than necessary to get around. I don’t even want to talk about what time we woke up, but it was early as hell. Especially for me since for some stupid reason I didn’t think it was a good idea to pack last night and so had to wake up extra early this morning to manage to stuff my things into my backpack and longchamp for the weekend. Success!

The airport was so ridiculous. It was filled with rugby fans traveling around with their team for the rugby equivalent of the World Cup. These people are die hard. I mean, there are hundreds, probably thousands of fans, traveling with their team! One gentleman said that he had heard that over 30,000 people were moving around SA today. Out of control. Is it really that horrible to maybe watch the game at home with a group of other die hard fans? Apparently it is.

I was feeling pretty good when we first arrived to the Durban area. That’s where we were flying to by the way. Fly from Cape Town to Durban, spend the afternoon there, and then drive to Pietermaritzburg in the evening which is about an hour away. I say I was feeling pretty good because I definitely slept on Anthony the whole plane ride over. The poor kid has turned into my nap-on buddy.

Our time in Durban involved museums and the beach. I’m sure you’ll never be able to guess which part I enjoyed more. Funny story though, we definitely went to the wrong museum at first, courtesy of our bus driver. We were all walking around looking for some stories on apartheid, and were getting nothing. It was really random, and I’m not sure who figured out that we were in the wrong location but we eventually made it to the right museum for a quick walk-through before lunch on the beach. Lunch sucked, but I’ve also not really been enjoying any of my food lately so I’m probably a biased source. After lunch was awesome though because we got to go in the ocean! I wasn’t planning on it since my hair was straight and the water was cold, but that was a huge fail. I have a lot of trouble resisting the ocean, and this big Indian one was calling my name. Minor problem that I didn’t have a towel. At least it was minor until I got out and almost froze my butt off. Really though, that was the coldest part of my body. TMI maybe? Sorry…

Our drive to Pietermaritzburg was maybe about an hour long, I’m not sure. Victoria and I listened to Disney music on my iPod for the majority of it before I finally slept for the last little bit of the trip. Our B&B here is awesome, but really isolated. There are five of us staying in the biggest cottage (Lauren, Rose, Victoria, Naomi, and I). The others are paired up in other cottages. I didn’t’ really notice much to do around our B&B, so I think the group is going to provide ourselves with the majority of our entertainment while we’re here. Case in point: Dinner tonight, cooked by our very own Professor Bill Chafe. It was really good, and even better that it wasn’t from a restaurant for the first time in forever! And get this, the B&B gives you cake every night and chocolate every morning. Uh oh, bad news for my body, good news for the satisfaction of my tummy.

Tomorrow is a day in Pietermaritzburg, so we’ll see how it differs from Cape Town.

Ukuthula and good night,
Lynn