Cape Town, October 4th

Hello,

So this is it then, 2 months of brutality, slogging it the length of Africa followed by a little bit of work! It's been fun, but I feel exhausted and don't really know if i'll cope with the madness of Uni life. I have been told off for making it appear like i'm just partying in SA, so i'll do my best to make it look as if we have behaved otherwise!

Anyway, continuing from where I left off, we headed to cape town on the luxury, overnight greyhound.The journey was broken briefly at midnight for me and Martyn to sing happy birthday in recognition of Nick's 21st, but asides from that we just crashed out.

Cape Town is a beautiful city, and the first day was a beautiful, sunkissed, heat fest. We checked into our Hostel, Ashanti, and grabbed Geoff. Heading out into the sunshine we took the opportunity to head up the looming presence that is Table Mountain. The views were immense both from the summit and the cable car, and I was having a lovely time until someone suggested absailing down the side of the mountain! Somehow I survived this madness and after quaffing a couple of cokes each in celebration at still being alive, we headed down to celebrate Nico's birthday in style. A good night on Long Street was had by all, in spite of my managing to lose half the group and wandering into the blackest, roughest club in in the Western Cape with an extremely blonde companion in Candice. Naturally we were accepted and loved by all, further enhancing my opinion the black Saffas are generally nicer than whites.

The next day was another scorcher, so we grabbed more Marine Biologists and headed to the cricket for a bit of Pakistan v Bangladesh. It was a pretty good game and we managed to get a lot of chat going on with the dancers. For our Thursday evenings entertainment we headed to Ignite, in Camp's Bay, for what has been described to me by every Saffa I've met as the best night immaginable. It didn't disappoint as, after bribing the door staff to over look our scruffy trainers and lack of 21 year olds, we found ourselves at the international launch party for Gucci sunglasses shmoozing with the beautiful people of Cape Town.

Friday saw us hitting the markets and generally having a bit of a mince around Cape Town in the morning before heading to Stellenbosch in the afternoon for some lovely wine tasting and chilled out studenty times watching bands at the uni bars. We stayed at a friend's in Stell, and I managed to get properly scared as, hearing noises by the door from my bed in the living room, I wandered up to have a look out of the window and found a rather large fellow attempting to break in. He ran away, while I hid in the double bed with Geoff and Eric. The next morning we caught the train back to cape town, with poverty winning over safety, and managed to avoid being robbed/stabbed/thrown off the train by being the rowdiest people on there and generally scaring the good people of the cape. To be honest I don't think its as dangerous as people make out, but apparently 5 white boys shouldn't get the train, ever. Saturday was the semi-finals day in the 20/20 cricket so we headed down for yet another Pakistan game at Newlands this time wearing faux Mexican moustaches. We looked damn cool. The game was good and aside from a little bit of rain, the mexicans had a great time.

The next day saw us head down the cape to Simon's Town, where we watched whales from the beach and hung out with the epic African Penguins. We also had lunch at the epic Cape to Cuba, possibly my favourite restaurant in the World ever, before heading back into Cape Town for the Sunday markets and to watch TV.

Monday was heritage day in Safa so we took advantage of the free museums to take in the national gallery, the South Africa museum, the slave lodge and of course the aquarium.
I now realise the problem with trying to write a blog 2 weeks after events occur as I can't actually remember what we did on the tuesday, but i'm sure it was amazing!

Since then we have been on our fieldcourse (the entire reason I came out here apparently). Which had entailed days hanging out bird watching in the lagoon, doing studies on rocky shore species such as the Mediterranian mussel or a type of Whelk that I can't remember the name of, creating studies for Cape weaver birds, counting springbok, watching zebras, fighting toroises against each other and playing cricket every free momment of time we could get.
The showers were cold and the accomodation pretty basic but the food was outrageously good and plentiful, so much so in fact thatwe've all put on around 3 kilos in a week!

"The lads", as our lecturers call us, had a fantastic time working hard on a critically aclaimed study on whether the Cape Weaver female prefers older or newer nests (result of which is we are 85% sure it makes no difference if the nest is old, but hey the marks are in the process, not in the result, these are wild animals don't ya know) and the highlight of the week was our group dominating everyone else on the course in the Marine Biology/South African general knowledge quiz! (I'm pretty sure they all thought we were gonna come last and have to clean the vans, instead of which we walked away showered in glory!)

We got back to Kaapstad yesterday and all died of exhaustion within around 3 hours. Boredom is rapidly settling in and with it the freying of tempers and to be honest I would rather like to fly now! Hope everyone has enjoyed my Blog!

LOL

Jx