Trip of a lifetime

Post on: Friday, December 30th, 2011 at 10:41 am
Category: Dragon Boat, holidays, Photography, Travel | Tags: England, South Africa

The goal was to update more when I was down there when doing it all now when I got back however the wifi connections down there weren’t the best. I was able to read my email and check twitter on my ipod with no problem but if I wanted to blog/surf the web on the laptop, you’d be doing some weird yoga poses to find a signal which I wasn’t really into. When I came come wrote about six posts different things about the trip, though this post was meant to be posted before the beaches one.. Oh well.

Anyways, Back in June/July I heard that my best friend and her family were planning on heading back down to South Africa to spend Christmas with some family. Since my friends brothers girlfriend and I’ve never been, we were invited to tag along as well. Some days I wish all my flights, I book were direct flights this way I wouldn’t have to deal with long layovers but of course it doesn’t happen that way. We had about a 4 hour layover which wasn’t that bad since there was 6 of us. We always had someone to talk to/look after our bags if we had to head to the washrooms etc. Plus free booze on long flights is a bonus.

Once we landed in Johannesburg, a family friend came by and picked us all up and gave us a quick tour of the city and dropped our gear off at my friend’s aunts place as we were staying there. That afternoon we went to a amusement park and took the mining tour. Trying to stay awake for that was hard but it was nice to walk around and getting all the joints moving again.

The next day we were off to Kruger National Park. The drive to and from there was long but being able to see every wild animal, you could image was amazing and at arm length . Sometimes it felt like they were watching us more so then we were watching them. The best part of the safari was seeing maybe an hour old Zebra (it popped it’s head up for a few seconds then laid back down) wish it got up when we were there, but there was only so much waiting around you could do. Didn’t see any Leopards or Cheetahs in the wild but did see them at a wildlife rehab centre.

Check out my flickr account if you’d like to see more pictures

Once we got back into Johannesburg, the next day we spent time at one of the local museums, like with all museums there are parts you just skip pass and other parts you could just look at all the articles/artwork all day. Even with 2012 just around the corner there you can still find that racism is still around, may not be as noticeable as it once was globally but it’s still around and with that once you get your ticket to enter into the building you are either white or non-white and gave us kids (who didn’t grow up with the whole colour divide a view of what life was like).

The flight to Cape Town is about two hours, which wasn’t that long but it was long enough that we given a real meal, none of this pay $5 by a credit card for a few slices of cheese and crackers crap that all North American airlines do to save a couple of bucks. Once we landed in Cape Town, we were surprised by my friends cousin who met us at the airport. Once we got our two rental cars we drove did a quick tour of Cape Town as we were heading to my friends Grandma’s place.

The next day or so, we (7 of us) packed up again and road tripped it across South Africa to the town where the Grandma grew up in. It was really neat but creepy that we were staying in the house that she grew up in. I only say it’s creepy as it’s now a hunting lodge and since none of us hunt, we were just grossed out by the animal skins all over the place. Traveling with 4 vegetarians can be interesting at times.

While we were there we (the four kids) went tubing and I re-flamed my shoulder/arm up again… Stupid move I know.. On the way back we did a cave tour, did a lot of swimming at all the local beaches, another highlight was the paragliding (I didn’t go), hiked up Cape Point, did some winery tours, saw some wild penguins and went to the local aquarium.

Managed to see some dragonboats while I was in Cape Town which made my day, sure they were just at the dock but I didn’t care as we were at the wharf mid afternoon when we spotted them (to early for teams to be practicing).

If I ever do go down there again, I’d bring two suitcases one for my clothes and another one for all my purchases.