Kloofing (S. Africa)

I have been constantly writing this email on the day things happen to be a little more accurate and since I have a short memory problem, it's probably better this way. Here is the South African Update:

Table Mtn, Cape Town, S. Africa

Coming into Cape Town at 8am (same as every port) gave us an incredible view with Table Mountain peeking over the horizon well before we even saw the city. Table Mountain gets it's name from the top of it being very flat. It is a popular climb taking roughly 2 hours and has around 300 different trails ranging in difficulty. Even the most seasoned veterans of mountain climbing have been stranded on the side of this mountain. There is a cable car that runs up it as well and has restaurants at the top. You can also go abseiling (repelling) part of the way down (actually the longest natural repel in the world). The locals call the occasional cloud cover, which we got to see, a table cloth because it only covers the top of the mountain and will sometimes inch its way down the side of the cliffs making it appear even more like a table cloth. Legend has it that this cloud/fog comes from a retired pirate who fled to the mountain after leaving his ship and smokes a pipe from time to time.



 The first day, a few of us left as soon as the ship was cleared and set out to find out exactly what we were going to do since we had no prior plan. We found a Cape Town Travel Info place that seemingly every SAS student was at. We finally got up to one of the counters and set up a trip for the afternoon. We decided that we wanted to visit the Winelands and since everyone seemed to be going there in a few days on bikes, we decided to go on horseback. We took a private car to a small out of town place, more a hobby farm, and met a very nice family who saddled us up and provided a guide to take us through the winelands and taste test some wine. I rode a black stallion named Spencer who reminded me of Shadow and Thunder. Thunder was a horse I rode at Heartland Ranch in South Dakota and Shadow was a horse my mom took care of years ago and she took me some Saturdays to ride it with her. The views we saw as we made our way through the backcountry were incredible. We rode for over an hour until we got to the winery called Stellenbosch. We had the opportunity to taste test wine but since we left so late in the day, we only had 15 minutes before they closed. We rode the horses back to the hobby farm and had a great conversation with the owners who currently pay a commission to the agency in the city to recommend them to people who want to go through the winelands. We told them about The Lonely Planet and how it has so much information in it that people rely on and if they could somehow get into it, their business would increase and they wouldn’t have to use the agency in the city anymore. We told them that we would write in to The Lonely Planet and recommend them.

Today I heard there was a shark attack off the coast and someone (not sure if SAS) fell off Table Mountain.



Taking a break

 On our second day, I rented a bike and took it to the outskirts of town and randomly ended up at Table Mountain National Park after about 2 hours of biking. The park was full of trails so I had the chance to actually put the mountain bike to the test and had a spectacular view of the entire city below and waterfront. After going around the park I headed back to the waterfront. It was downhill the entire way so it took me roughly 15 minutes to literally fly down passing cars as I did. Once back in town, I saw the movie Hitch with Will Smith. My favorite part of the entire movie wasn’t even in it, it was a commercial before the starting of the show. The commercial started with a shot of a man dressed as a sheriff of the wild west, the screen was redish brown and had the flickering of an old projector/reel movie player. The sheriff walked up to a man in the saloon who had 3 smoking bullet holes to the left of his head and said to him “I thought I told you never to come back here!” and the assumed outlaw said, “Well, I was going to be I thought…" nih—nih—nih, nih nih nih nih nih—nih—nih” and the sherrif says “oh” and suddenly the outlaw as a double-barrelled shotgun pointed at the sheriff and with a bewildered look on his face, the sheriff gets shot. Then, a woman’s voice comes over as the commercial ends and says “If they had wanted a cell phone in the movie, they would have put it there.” (If you don’t get it, the outlaw’s ‘nih—nih” was a cell phone going off and the sudden appearance of a shotgun was to show that you totally missed something important). Anyway, I thought it was funny. After the movie we went to a resturant called St. Elmos which made pizzas in a brick oven. Those of you who know, last summer I and a few others built a brick oven where at Round Hill and we got to try it out. The resturant was great, small and comfortable. The pizza was great (although they had an odd assortment of toppings which did not included sausage, pepperoni or any usual Pizza Hut toppings) but the pizza we made with the one I built at Round Hill was a lot better (I am bias though).

View from the top

Hiking up to Jump

The third day we went Canyoning which is a combination of kloofing, abseiling and rock climbing. I’m guessing that most of you have only heard of rock climbing before so I will use the term in the states that best describes what kloofing and abseiling are. First, kloofing is the same as rock jumping into a pool of water where abseiling is pretty much the same as repelling except that you repel through waterfalls. So this is how this all went down. We got up at 6am and headed to our pick up point but no one was there. We waited and waited but still no one. Finally they showed up and as it turns out, they were told the wrong time by the company who hired them. It was two men who started their own company 18 months ago called Frixion (friction) Adventures and had exclusive rights to a particular canyon we would be making our way down. After about a 45 minute drive, we arrived at a small cabin in the woods. It had wood paneling on the inside and smelled like a forest. We had breakfast there and took a truck up to the top of the mountain. Once at the top, we began our descent to a point where a creek began (at this point all of us had our harness and helmits on). We got to the creek, waded across and came to our first waterfall. The point of abseiling is to repel down the face of the waterfall into the pool below and head to the next one making your way down the mountain. After our first abseil, we came to the kloofing point (remember what that is??). Our guides (Brett and Scott) had us first jump off the 4 and 6 meter (12 and 18 feet approximately) a few times before allowing us to try the 15 meter. Don’t worry, the pool we were jumping into was over 20 meters deep with no rocks. Although I had no idea what I was doing way up there, I jumped. The proper way to jump from rocks into water from that far up is to have every part of you body tucked in if your diving or going in feet first (with shoes). Well, my left arm obeyed my command to stick to my side but my right seems to have a mind of its own and stuck straight out as I hit the water.



Landing Wrong

When I finally surfaced, I could hardly use my arm to swim the 10 meters to the edge and get out. My arm was so red after that. After I went, my friend Maggie went but she did worse than me. She lost control of her whole body and actually went into the water in a “L” shaped position and could barely move at all after that. After we finished cliff jumping, we headed further down stream (wadding in the stream to get down) and just before our next abseil we had lunch with a fire to warm us up. Then it was on to our last few abseils but before we got to finish even our first one, it started to rain. The nice thing about what we were doing was that it already involved getting wet in the waterfalls so it didn’t really bother us. It made the rocks that were at one point dry, wet but then again, just about everything we had been walking on and repelling down was slippery so it made little difference. When we did finish for the day, we headed back to the house and had dinner with our guides. It was a candle lit dinner since there was no electricity to the house and the generator was broken (they don’t like using the generator anyway because of the noise and it takes away from being in the middle of nowhere). Since the farm we were presently on had a trout farm, we got fresh smoked trout. Our guides were incredible, they had the know-how and skill along with a positive attitude and love of what they were doing. They were still small as a company (their office was one of their homes) but they have big ideas for the canyon in the near future.

On our fourth day in Cape Town, we headed to the other side of Table Mountain to Kirsenbosch Botanical Garden to relax for a little while. A world famous garden, Kirsenbosch used to be a forest 400 years ago but in the late 1600’s the trees were harvested to fulfill the need of timber for houses in the growing communities. Soon, the area was completely cleared and erosion from the streams coming off the mountain changed the landscape. It was farmed for a few years and then in the mid 1800’s a man by the name of Kirsenbosch purchased the land and began to turn it back over to nature. His dying wish was to have a garden behind Table Mountain that people can come to and see what the land used to be like before development. When he died in 1908, it was taken over by another man who followed up the dream and became the first director of the gardens in 1913. The gardens itself is incredibly huge. I walked around the outskirts of it and it took over an hour to get around. At one point I found myself walking up a hill that by the time I got to the top, there was an incredible view of the city below.

After being at the gardens for a few hours, my friend Katie and I decided to walk up Table Mountain. We found the only path leading out of the gardens and asked an employee how long it would take and they told us 3 hours. It was 4:45 so we knew we would have to move quickly. We walked for about 15 minutes and ran into 2 people from the ship going up the same route and linked up with them. After walking up well over 3,000 steps dug into the mountain side, we came to a rock quarry with rocks the size of cars and saw that the path went through. After we made our way over and around the rocks, the path started to go down. We walked and walked but never went uphill again for a while. Confused, we continued since this was the only way we could go. After about 30 minutes, it leveled off and the path widened, was well maintained and at some points, we actually walked on boardwalks that were still being constructed. The views we got of the city below were amazing and even as we were skirting along the ridgelines and through gorges and valleys the drop below (for those of you who don’t know, I hate heights) was quiet far. At one point, we came across a broken brick building and two canons overlooking the city. The canons oddly enough, were not facing the bay but right over the heart of the city. At this building, the trail seemed to disappear and it took us a while to find it again. Soon we approached the 3 hour mark and the sun was beginning to set but we had still not arrived at the top. We could see the ship and the tram that ran to the top for people who didn’t want to walk it but we were nowhere near it. We kept skirting along the middle of the mountain with the only visible sign of us ascending was a path well in front of us heading straight up a gorge. Just as we reached the gorge, the sun was set and we decided to not be a victim of the mountain and headed for the road we had seen below us. Once we made it to the road, we found someone who knew where we could find a taxi and began to head up the road. The wind had picked up at an incredible rate and luckly was at our back to push us in the right direction. The wind must have been at least 50 miles an hour. After we walked for another 30 minutes, we came up to the lower tram station and just as we got there, all the employees were getting into a matatu-like van and they offered us a ride off the mountain. The man who was running the shuttle introduced himself as Lucky. After laughing about his name, we later decided that he probably got a lot of people who are stranded on the mountain find the lower tram and he just calls himself Lucky to humor them. To make a long story short, we made it back safely but never reached the top.

Our fifth and final day in Cape Town was more of a relaxed day, got a few things and biked a little while and took a cab to the tram to make it to the top of the mountain the easy way. The view was amazing and well worth the attempt yesterday.

We didn’t visit Robben Island but it has such an important history that I thought I would include it briefly. Robben Island was used as a prison for political activists who opposed the government mainly during the 1960’s and 70’s. The most popular or well known of the prisoners was Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned in the early 70’s for speaking out against the atrocities of the government. He was sentenced to life on the island, working mainly in a quarry. His wife was only allowed to visit him twice a year and only behind glass, no contact, for the first five years until she too was arrested and sent into solitary confinement for no reason. They questioned her about her relation to activists and claimed that she was involved in various acts against the government. They kept her in solitary confinement for 17 months and finally let her go. During that time, she was allowed to write her husband once a month but receive none back from him. After serving 22 years, Mandela was finally released and shortly thereafter was elected president of South Africa. The tour is given by either an ex-prisoner or warden and includes a view of the cell Mandela stayed in.

That’s all for now, I guess it is a lot of writing but that’s what happened. Catch you all after Brazil.