Special Edition MEGA-POST: GARDEN ROUTE!

So I'm just gonna save space and say Thursday was relatively uninteresting other than that I went into town and bought a camera charger (I left mine at home.. ugh) in the city of Cape Town. That's the only eventful thing I did. And now onto the real blog post.

[Photo Disclaimer: I have approximately 500 (Yes, 500) pictures from this trip. Thus, posting them all online at any point would be absolutely mad on my prepaid internet. So, I will instead get to an internet cafe soon and do some major posting. That's the plan anyway.]
The trip on the Garden Route was Friday through Sunday, and jam packed with adventure. The plan was to drive this historic route and to stop at various awesome places along the way. I traveled with 15 or so other ProjectsAbroad volunteers who also decided to do the trip; 9 were in my van. I made some excellent friends on this journey, and I'm really glad I went.

A bit of the scenery and people. The pictures really don't do it justice, though.

The first stop was the Cango Caves which are basically really, really old limestone caves that you walk around and learn about. Apparently one cavern used to play host to classical music concerts from local orchestras (HOW COOL IS THAT?!), but they had to stop in 1994 due to vandalism. Lame. Who comes and vandalizes a classical music concert? Anywho, after we learned about that stuff, we entered the ADVENTURE part of the tour, where we had to climb through nooks, crannies, and small crevices while contorting our bodies into all kinds of strange positions to make it through the caves' labyrinth. It felt very much like an Indiana Jones movie - very epic.

Cango Caves.

That night, we stopped at a hostel (read what this is if you aren't sure, very cool!) and had a wonderful dinner consisting of Braai food (Braai is South African barbeque). We talked over drinks and had a really great time.

In the morning, we got up and headed to a game reserve for a safari! Driven in a sort of dune-buggy-for-tourists, we snapped pictures of three of the "Big Five," (Rhinoceros, Leopard, Cape Buffalo, Elephant and Lion make up this group), although the reserve only had Rhinos, Buffalos, and Lions from this list. We also saw a Giraffe (he was kind of far away though) and lots of Zebras. Alligators were there chilling as well. Many pictures coming soon from this, whenever I can get my butt to an internet cafe.This is not clipart from the internet; I took this picture. How cool is that?!

Next up was MONKEYLAND. Yes, Monkeyland. As you can imagine, we saw all sorts of monkeys there, and walked across South Africa's longest suspension bridge (wildly unstable, and scary as crap, by the way). There were also lemurs, which reminded me of the Duke Lemur Center. When I mentioned this to my travelmates, one of them asked me why a college would funnel so much money into something like lemurs. Clearly, because Duke is awesome.

And next, the World's Highest Bungee Jump. I thought a lot about whether I was going to do this; the concept behind it still doesn't strike me as particularly safe. Nonetheless, I signed up. Why I did it, I still have no idea. After a lot of waiting and hiking up to the bridge that we would eventually jump off (I have a DVD of this that I want to upload eventually), I waited my turn and watched my fellow companions jump. The whole process is very upbeat and streamlined; the workers quickly put you in the gear (which, coincidentally isn't very much: it consists of one backup harness (in case the bungee breaks) and a boot thing attached to your ankles that seems to be attached with a few knots and velcro. Yes, velcro.) and then dance to the high-energy adrenaline-pumping techno music playing in the background. When it was my turn, I was relatively calm until I got to the edge. However, I didn't have much time to ponder, as once I could see the edge, they counted down "5-4-3-2-1 BUNGEEE!" and then I jumped. The first 2 seconds (it's about 5 seconds of pure free fall) were like flying; it's eerily quiet and you really feel like a superhero, soaring to his destination. Once the bungee finally caught, my blood was quickly rushing to my head (slightly uncomfortable) and then I began to bounce up and down on the bungee. This was a little scary; even though I had reached the bottom, I still kept pondering all of the things that could go wrong (the engineer in me never fully trusts any system, even though I did miserably in physics). I finally got up and felt amazing. The adrenaline rush you get is really like no other. Would I do it again? Yes. I would.

That night, we stayed at a really nice hostel which cooked us a nice meal and then we sat around the campfire and basically sang every song ever. Glee, Disney, Backstreet Boys, Muscials.. you name it, we did some version of it. The hostel provides a guitar for its guests to use (genius!), and I was able to tell one of my travelmates the chords for some songs that we could sing to as well. It was a long, warm, pleasant evening.

This picture isn't particularly flattering of the group as a whole, but I really wanted to include some picture from the campfire. This is actually the best one we all took. It still captures the spirit of the evening, I think. Shalini needs to look at this camera, not her own, though ;)

In the morning, we left for ZIPLINING in the Tsit
sikamma natural rainforest. We basically hiked and zipped our way around various destinations in the forest. Sounds very simple, but the sheer view we got (nothing like the view we got doing bungee jumping of course) doing it and the exhilaration of zipping through the forest at high speeds was awesome.
A long drive back then ensued, filled with sleep, many snack breaks, more singing, and lots of laughs. I made some great friends on this trip and hope to be hanging out with them more!