Garden Route

Hello again!  Last night we finished our epically long Garden Route tour.  Let me just say: It was incredibly beautiful.  As someone who comes from an exceptionally beautiful place, I am kinda hard to impress, but South Africa is off the charts in the beauty department.  A lot of the places we went to where similar to the type of beauty you would see in Oregon, but on a much larger scale.  Instead of trying to explain to you any further, I will just show you the evidence!  Although my pictures are not of any remarkable quality, they do the area far greater justice than I can with words.

At the gas station where we ate breakfast

Action shot from the bus

sitting on an ostrich.  Don't tell PETA.

The ostrich farm, I had some ostrich meat on a salad (good, but kinda tough) but ostriches are also farmed for their feathers.  They can regrow their feathers in 6 months! 

The coast! It's the Indian Ocean.  I swam in it!  It was really cold, but refreshing after  a hike to the  look out bench at the top of the mountain in the picture below.
   

We climbed to the top! Very carefully.  

This was so pretty! At the end of a bit of a hike, we sat and ate lunch at the waterfall.  

This was the end of the amazing sunset that we saw while watching our crazy comrades bungee jump.  I took about twenty pictures as the sun went down, which may have been excessive, but every time I looked up it was more beautiful than it was the moment before. 

The water is the ocean.  This was taken from a suspension bridge. 

A bay where we ate lunch on the last day of out tour.  There was a marathon finishing, a festival going on and a rugby game on the television! 

Today we met up with the rest of our UWC crew, and went to Kwa-Mzoli's which was a kind of a bar and barbecue place.  But that description barely scratches the surface of what it was really like.  First we went through a line to pick out the (raw) meat that we wanted to eat.  The workers put it in a bin and slid it down the counter to a cash register where we paid.  then we walked the bin back to the kitchen where we left it to be braaied or barbecued  I was a little overwhelmed, so I didn't really catch what kind of things they were using to cook it, but next time I will take a closer gander.  So we left our meat with them, and went out to the dining area. I thought it was packed, but the locals told me that it was not such a busy day.  There were people everywhere, eating, dancing, smoking hooka, and drinking impressive amount.  All around a good time.  

Tomorrow we will have our first day of orientation, which is sure to be thrilling.  No, in actual seriousness we will be going on a township tour, which I am looking forward to.  I'll let you know how it goes! 

Lots of Love