Feb 19, 2011 After going to sleep last night at like 3:30, we woke up at 5:30 to eat breakfast really quick and make the bus for our safari adventure. Haley, her roommate Kerri, Molly, Patrick and I got on the same bus and were promptly asleep. Patrick and I were sitting together, and we were talking one minute and then he was literally asleep in 5 seconds. I have never seen anything like it. Of course, my sleeping issues didn’t allow me to fall asleep but I snoozed a bit. After about a 2-hour bus ride we arrived at the Aquila Private Game Reserve. It wasn’t a legit, animals live in their habitat, type of place, but all of the animals they had had been rescued from poachers all over South Africa, so that was pretty cool. We were greeted with champagne and a delicious breakfast of anything our little hearts desired, and then spent some time sitting outside by the infinity pool admiring the elephants and ostriches walking by. We got onto the safari 4x4s and headed out onto the reserve to try to spot Africa’s “big 5”- elephants, lions, buffalo, leopards, and rhinos. We saw tons of springbok, South Africa’s national animal, and some zebras and giraffes too. It was pretty awesome. At one point, we saw two elephants and one rhino standing together eating from the same pile. Our driver situated us so that we could get away quickly if we needed to, because he said that elephants and rhinos “aren’t usually friends” and things could get ugly. We could tell it was kind of tense, both the elephants had their man parts out on display and any little move by either side caused a reaction on the other. Excuse me, but let’s just say, I now know why people say “hung like an elephant”- at one point the elephant used his parts to scratch his stomach. After about 3 hours of animal spotting we went back to the lodge and had a delicious lunch some free time until we left. Patrick swam while Haley, Molly, Kerri and I dipped our feet in the pool and chatted. We got back on the bus and, once again, slept the whole way back. We got back and changed real quick then met back up to take the cable car up to Table Mountain to watch the sunset. It was seriously one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. We got up to the top about 30 minutes before the sunset, and we took tons of pictures and drank some coffee admiring the view. The “hooter” as they call it went off after a while, which meant that we had to catch a car down because the winds were picking up. We reluctantly left after a few more pictures and made our way down to catch a cab. We headed to a little town called Camps Bay, right outside of Cape Town, to have dinner. We met Kim at a place called Codfather. We sat waiting for our table, drooling over the sushi moat. Seriously the freshest sushi I’ve ever seen, being prepared right in front of our faces. We got our table and ordered some wine called Springfield, which was awesome, and then learned about what was to come. The place was purely seafood, and it was a visual menu. Our waiter took us up to a counter where she explained all the different types of fish we could see and then we picked. We decided to go a big pot of a bunch of different types, and we all ate out of the communal dish. Everything was so delicious and fresh that I didn’t even need sauce, which is saying something because I am such a sauce person. We also finally at the sushi we had been staring at- which was great. The meal was amazing, it was a great group of people and we were all so elated by our awesome day, you could just feel the happiness radiating out of everyone. Something I’ve learned about myself is that I am very susceptible to the attitudes of the people around me, and I was so happy that night so I know that everyone else was too. The most common statement that I heard from our friends in Cape Town was something like “I can’t believe this is real life.” After dinner we all crammed in a cab (I was stuffed on Pat’s lap with a full stomach- sorry Patrick) and came home and went to sleep. We had been living on about 3 hours of sleep per night and we decided it was starting to catch up with us, but we didn’t feel bad because we had such a great night.
