The drive took about 5 hours, but on the way was the most amazing classic African sunrise! There were trees with flat tops and the whole sky was bright orange, then an even brighter orange orb broke the horizon! It was so so so cool! and so so so pretty!
We came over a ridge and Cape town is just sprawled out below. Its right on a bay and has huge sky scrapers and is nestled right up next to Table Mountain (which I plan to climb next month with one of my friends here). Its really a beautiful sight.
We went to the waterfront first, and parked right next to where the World Cup Soccer Stadium was. We walked around there for a bit and then went and got a behind the scenes tour of the Two Oceans Aquarium. Which was awesome!!! They have a huge circular tank full of rays and ragged tooth sharks, a tropical section with eels and a tiny turtle and a tank full of clown fish with a bubble you could crawl under so it was like you were in the tank. They also had a really cool kelp forest. They took us on the roof of the aquarium and you could see the giant plunger that gave the kelp forest its tides and we went down to the launch site for divers going into the big circular tank.
Then they took us the the culture lab where they grow all of the food cultures (sea monkeys and such) and they had a tank of new baby sea horses that were smaller than a fingernail!!! Cutest thing ever!!
From there we drove an hour to Simon's Town where we went to Shark Explorer to get our gear for the next day's dive. That took a while because there were like twenty of us who all needed gear, but then we went down the road to the Backpacker's Hostel where we were staying. We walked down to a waterfront restaurant and had a delicious meal and then crashed to get ready for our dive the next day.
We took two boats: one was the shark explorer and the other was a ducky (a boat with inflatable sides attached to a real hull). We left the bay and followed the coast til it ended, seeing a whale on the way! We past the southern most tip of Africa and headed towards Antarctica. A little over an hour later and we were chumming for sharks.
Nothing but a seal showed up, so me moved to a spot where a bunch of fishing boats looking for yellowfin tuna were hanging out. The guides set out their chum bucket with a tuna head attached and fished while we waited for some sharks to show up. They broke out some food for us and while we were eating the main skipper, Steph, hooked a >70 kg tuna! It was huge!! It took a lot of fight, swearing, and requests for a brandy for Steph to bring him up, but finally the two other guys were able to gaff it in the head and pull him on board. They stabbed it in the heart to drain the blood and use it as chum. The amount of blood that came out of that fish was unreal!
The sharks started going crazy and we decided it was high time we were under the water with them. We were in about 700 m of water There was absolutely nothing around us but a whole lot of water. They attached the chum bucket to a buoy so it hung about 5 m under the water and we stayed around there and let the sharks swim around us... It was AMAZING! there was one shark that started swimming towards me and I just stared him down. But he was just coming to say hi and gave me a friendly kiss on the cheek. One of the diver's actually got it on video, but I don't know how to upload it... It was so cool! There was another one that was swimming right above me and I held my breath so my bubbles wouldn't scare him, and he swam fight into my head, and knocked my hood back.
We got back into the boats and froze in the wind and the spray for our two hour boat ride back to the harbor. After that we went back to the hostel to shower and get warm. We went on a grocery store run to get food to grill at our braai (South African word for barbeque) We didn't end up eating until after 10:00 and everyone was pretty exhausted, but a few of us managed to make it down the street to one of Simon's town only bar. We made some friends from the Argentinian Navy that taught us a new dart game. I was so so tired though, and had to go back after one beer.
The next day we woke up and went to cape point, which is sort of the edge of the world. There's a lighthouse there that we hiked up to and then we hiked down to a little beach that was right there. It was beautiful!!
After that we drove started our drive back to cape town... There was a storm just sitting on the top of Table Mountain, and we were driving right towards it. As we headed up the hill there was an awesome double rainbow that we literally drove through! We ran right over the pot of gold, but our driver refused to stop.
It was out of this world, then the rainbow followed us for about ten minutes! coolest thing ever! then there was a beautiful sunset and we got back to Mossel Bay around 11:30 pm and went to bed so we could work the next day.
