Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Cape Town - the adventure begins!

For Easter Holiday, we MSU students decided to embark on a journey to Cape Town. We rented a car and left Friday evening for a 22 hour journey along the “Garden Route” which stretches along the eastern sea border of South Africa. The drive was gorgeous, but it was mostly spent driving through the dark. I was not quite comfortable with facing insane South African driving, or driving on the left side of the road – so my job was to keep the driver awake throughout the night. Luckily, we faced no problems and arrived at our “Titsikama Backpackers” destination safely the next day.
Titsikama is about 6 hours north of Cape Town. The backpackers we stayed at offers Treetop Canopy Tours, which we all did the next day. We left at about 3pm for safety training and to get harnessed up. The location of the tours is in one of South Africa’s few remaining indigenous rainforests, and the views were absolutely beautiful. We zip lined from tree to tree, attached by pulleys and carabineers.










Our next stop was in Plettenberg Bay, the home of the worlds highest bungee jump. It is 216 m high off a huge bridge underneath a highway. I was not having it. At first it sounded like a good idea, but after talking to a couple people about how they felt like they almost slipped out of their harnesses and one girl’s foot strap came off, I decided against the idea. Luckily, Stephanie decided not to go either, and the two of us went to curios and took pictures of the other jumpers, which was a lot of fun – and we also saved some money.
The same day, we finished the remaining 6 hours of our drive to Cape Town. Along the way, we stopped at three beaches to relax on the rocks. At one stop, we were able to see dolphins, and they put on a little show for us, doing flips above the water. The backpackers we stayed at in Cape Town, “Deco” was by far my favorite of all the hostels. Every room was painted in a bright, vibrant color – and we had a hammock, a pool, and lots of dogs and cats to play with.

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