Well, I have much to tell you about. It’s been quite a while. For the sake of time, yours and mine, I will tell you about myself but spare the unnecessary details that I seem to ever-so-unskillfully add into my usual blogs.
Let me tell you about an amazing weekend in UCT. Friday afternoon, after class, Geo, Taylor, Lans and I hiked up Lion’s Head, a short trail that I am all too familiar with now, seeing as I’ve hiked it about 4 or 5 times. Why you ask? Simple: it is the shortest hike for the best view of Cape Town. Apparently, it’s the best paragliding venue azwell. Paragliding on that Friday afternoon was beautiful. The sport is much more thorough and detail-oriented than I imagined, and I spent most of the ride asking him what he was doing at any given moment. Perhaps that is the reason the “thermal winds began to decrease” over an amount of time. The view was breathtaking, even better than I had imagined, and the greatest thing about paragliding is the sense of thrill is minimal compared to sky diving so you can better experience where you are and what you are seeing. After our paragliding session, we all met up at a restaurant called Blues in Camps Bay for Taylor’s birthday dinner. I ordered a mushroom burger…heaven.
Saturday, Dylan, Taylor, Julia and I hiked up skeleton gorge to table mountain. It was a great day for a hike and the company was talkative and cheery. After 3.5 hours of hiking, it’s amusing to run into tourists at the top of the mountain who clearly took the cable car up to sip on wine and take pictures (aka, outfits were starkly contrasting). Later that evening, we went with a group to a professional Stormers Rugby game, in which we stole the win in the last minutes. The players are huge and could probably consume me without chewing. Needless to say, the sport is very entertaining.
The next morning, Taylor and I woke up early to start our next adventure. We started what we though was a short trek up the steep side of table mountain, hoping to make it to the top in under an hour for our abseiling appointment. Of course, about 15 minutes in, we were informed that the path took 2 hours, at a minimum and was quite steep. Inevitably (because I was involved), we ended up taking a wrong turn some way up and took the advanced route up the last third of the hike, only to reach a sign that read “This is not the easy way down” right before our summit. Whoops. We reached the top in time to abseil (repel) down the face of table mountain. The best part about this is that, since you lower yourself, you are able to simply stop and look around and below you at any moment. About half way down, “there is a surprise”, at which point, the cliff’s edge ceases to exist and you simply lower yourself dangling. My rope started to turn me, allowing me a 360 degree panorama of the landscape from the mountain. When we reached the bottom we hiked back up to the top and took the cable car down.
Immediately after our abseil adventure, Taylor and I showered and took a mini-bus to Mzolis, a butchery in the township of Gugulethu. The restaurant opened in early 2003 and has since become somewhat of a socialite’s hangout, known for public drunkenness and lots and lots of meat (so much meat). It is an especially interesting place because the locals in Gugulethu are mainly Xhosa-speaking, impoverished, black people (yes, it is politically correct to call someone ‘black’ here), while visitors of Mzoli’s are often wealthy, white, tourists. During the night, the township is lively but dangerous; during the proper weekend days it is overcrowded with the hustle and bustle of wealth and poverty sitting across the table from one another. It was a refreshing phenomenon. lso, the day was hot, and a nice Hunter’s Dry cider has never tasted better (thanks for introducing me to Hunter, Dyl). After a good nap and a dip in the pool, the church service was the perfect end to a great weekend.
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