The Luckiest-Ben Folds

So, after my impromptu journey to Keiskammahoek on Friday, I got up early Saturday morning and headed out on an overnight excursion with my study aborad program. Gilliam (the Interstudy coordinator for the Eastern Cape, who also happens to be a professor in the Geography department at Rhodes) and I met and travelled to Port Alfred (one of the two closest beaches to Grhamstown), where we met three of the Interstudy students who are studying as Nelsen Mandela Metropolitan University (in Port Elizabeth, so they get to be at the beaches all the time). There are four Interstudy students at NMMU this semester, but the guy was away for the weekend, so the rest of us had a girls’ night (or rather, weekend) out. We ate a scrumptious breakfast at this adorable little restaurant/pub/bed&breakfast that was built in a Tudor-style, and reminded me of good times in Tudor 3 last year. On the other hand, Tudor House at Gettysburg never had a patio full of plants where cute older women with British-sounding South African accents brought you tea in little tea pots while jovial grandpas watched the rugby game just inside the open veranda doors.

Speaking of rugby (short tangent)… the All-Blacks played (aka crushed their opponents) on Saturday, and while it is really exciting to watch New Zealand play—they are a really good team and their Haka is intense—I am obviously supporting South Africa for the World Cup. The cup started during term vac, which was fun because we could watch the games in Durban with a ton of very passionate fans, but as the world cup is in New Zealand this year, all of the games are on at like 9am South African time, which makes it difficult to watch them now that we are back at school. Actually, it mostly makes it difficult for me to watch them, other people just skip class and go to the Rat&Parrot or some other bar to watch when SA is playing. I, unfortunately, feel the need to go to class, especially since I have missed several in the past two weeks due to spontaneous adventures. However, while I was in Durban, I bought a Springboks jersey, and since then I have made so many friends! Haha, but really, it is so funny the number of random conversations get into with people now on game days. Also, in case you are Melissa Dorrance and think that I only like rugby because of the movie Invictus, I would like to point out that rugby is way more intense than football, and that it is fun to watch regardless of whether or not Matt Daemon is involved. I wish that we watched rugby instead of football on Thanksgiving… this, of course, is legitimately possible for me this year, since at the end of November I will still be in South Africa, where they have neither NFL nor Thanksgiving (I actually tried to explain Thanksgiving to some girls recently, but I’m not sure how successful I was…)

Anyway, back to last weekend! So we left Port Alfred and drove to Kenton-On-Sea, the other beach closest to Grahamstown, where we took a boat ride up the Kariega River to a game reserve. It was super cool, as game reserves tend to be pricey, and thus not somewhere I would go on my budget. We rode on the boat with two older couples (from Australia and France), and when we got to the river camp, all I could think was “someday I want to be retired with money so I can travel to these places.” It was really cool, and had the feel of those places that are meant to be rustic but are really very posh. The staff fed us lunch at the river camp (it was some of the best food I have had since I got here… calamari and springbok and this amazing bread and if I actually continue describing it I am never going to finish this post) and we had a while to chill and check out the camp… there was a really cute rocking giraffe that was very sturdy (I may have tested it out).

In the afternoon, we went on a game drive on the other side of the river, where the “dangerous game” was. It was funny, because game reserves are so highly managed that I felt a little bit the Animal Kingdom safaris at Disney World. On the other hand, they are still wild animals, and I got to see them in Africa, even if they are not actually wandering around wild in the bush. We got to see lions and cheetahs for the first time since I got here, which was super exciting. The park had three of lions, although they were fenced in separately from the main reserve; apparently, it takes a ton of land to provide enough prey to feed lions if they were to wander around in the prey populations, and they also have a tendency to eat the really expensive animals in the reserve, such as the cape buffalo, rather than the impala or other buck that are really abundant. Since the lions were separate, they hadn’t eaten the buffalo, and I got to see them as well. There were, of course, a bunch of bucks of all kinds, including some kudu, impala, and these huge buck that reminded me of a mountain ram. There were also zebra everywhere, which I enjoyed, as I now have a million pictures to prove to Ron Malone that I found some.

I was really excited about the cheetahs; they were fenced in like the lions, but we were able to get out of our safari vehicle and walk right up to their enclosure. According to Bailey, one of my bosses at Ft. Detrick, cheetahs aren’t really a danger to an adult human, because we are outside the size range of animals that they will attack (children, on the other hand, are exactly the size of an impala), so you can actually walk right in the enclosure with them. We couldn’t go in the enclosure at Sibuya (the reserve where we were), but our ranger did say that its fun to have children on a drive, because when they visit the cheetah enclosure, the cheetahs will get very interested and walk right up to the fence. When we were there, they could have cared less about us… the male cheetah was much more interested in the female cheetah on the other side of the fence (our ranger essentially said that they were separated to build up sexual tension in the hope that when they remove the barriers, the cheetahs will mate… I thought it was hilarious, but apparently it had worked for other pairs in the past).

Saturday evening we had a braai (it was, after all, National Braai Day… okay, actually it was National Heritage Day, but it has also become braai day) and stayed in a bungalow in Port Alfred. The next morning, we got up and ate breakfast on a boat as we cruised around the marina and up the river a bit at Port Alfred, and then we rented these ridiculous things called hydrobikes and rode around the harbor by ourselves. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of said bikes, so just imagine it in your head and chuckle a bit: basically, it is a bike frame mounted on two parallel pontoons, with a little propeller that spins when you pedal the bike. The handlebars are attached to a rudder-looking device so that when you turn the handles, the bike turns ever so gently in the water. It was extremely embarrassing and touristy, but also so funny that we had a good time pedaling around the marina (not very quickly, I might add in a disgruntled tone, as the propellers were too small and we decided that  we were not traveling at a rate proportional to the effort we put into pedaling.)

We headed back to our respective universities Sunday after lunch with more of a tan than we had before (or in my case, sunburn fading into tan) and absolutely no motivation to accomplish anything. It seemed like this is probably acceptable at NMMU, where I am not sure that they actually have homework (the girls seemed to indicate that they don’t, and one of them was talking about how she just goes surfing all the time). Rhodes definitely has is pros and cons, but I will get into those another time… I have homework to do :)