Category: South Africa

The water swirls in the opposite direction down here. It’s quite the phenomenon.

-Manveer
Bringing you more great thoughts from the bathroom…

Today, we went to one of the organizations that we donated money to from the walk. It was absolutely mindblowing…the place is very well put together and they seem to have a handle on all of it. It was a really emotional experience because you don’t often get to see the change that you’re making with volunteer work (well, at least with the Walk for Hope). But this time, after seeing the effects, I was just beaming with pride and I couldn’t get over how happy I was to be a part of BTC and HOKISA. This day was what it was all about…just amazing. We could only spend a short amount of time with them because they don’t like the kids to form attachments and then be forced to break them again, since they’ve already suffered the feeling of abandonment a million times over.

The rest of the day was spent hiking and seeing sights. It felt a bit like cruising by Newport Beach on PCH when you look at the houses, but when you take a look in the other direction and see the shoreline and all of the surrounding beauty, it’s just breathtaking. There was a lot of running around, rock climbing and hiking to see all of the sights like Cape Point (the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet) and the Cape of Good Hope. We also spent some time at the beach which was largely populated by penguins. We were literally swimming with the penguins in the same water near us, and got plenty of chances to see them close up. They didn’t have any reservations about hanging around us, and we’ve been warned that they can bite your finger thinking it’s food if you mess around with them too much. Fortunately, we didn’t have to find that out the hard way despite our time spent playing with them.

A couple of scrapes and bruises were suffered during the day, but nothing major.

Tomorrow, we say goodbye to Capetown and head to Durban to spend the rest of our time with Lean on Me. And so another chapter unfolds…

Time to catch up on some sleep now…we don’t get much (though sleep is easily worth missing to experience all of this).

-Manveer