Table Mountain - What a View!

Two more busy exciting days have passed since my last post. Yesterday went completely different than I had originally thought. When I went into work my team was told that we would be working with a group of conservation officers to catch zebras in an area where they are overpopulated. We were of course very excited about this and everyone who wasn't part of my team was very jealous. When we arrived at the conservation area we told that the group had left without us and that we could just clean up garbage along the beach instead. We cleaned up for about one hour and then left. Apparantly there are people who are paid weekly to do that and they clearly were not doing a good job. We went back to SANCCOB at 9:30 and were told we could take the rest of the day off. Because I was already going to be off for 3 days I wanted to stay. I told them I hadn't yet worked with the penguins and was really interested in getting started. I stayed for 3 hours and learned how to pick the penguins up and pass them to someone. Despite what you might think, penguins are not cute and cuddly (just cute.) Even with a glove on I still managed to get some bruises on my hand, not looking forward to getting bit where I'm not wearing arm guards or gloves. After I left work for the day I was planning on going shopping to pick up a few things, but found out that a group of the volunteers were planning on climbing Table Mountain so I decided to go with them instead. Our taxi ended up being an hour and a half late so by the time we got there we only had two hours left to hike up in order to catch the last cable car down from the mountain. I made it about 30 minutes up and then realized I was too slow and tired and there was no way I was going to make it up in time. I decided to hike back down and take the cable car both up and down instead. Being on top of Table Mountain was incredible. The view from both sides, whether looking down on Cape Town or looking at the 12 Apostles, is stunning. Because my group was hiking the whole way I ended up being alone the entire time, but asked many friendly tourists to take pictures of me on my camera. I met up with my group just in time for the cable car ride down. After our trip we were all too tired to cook so we just ordered pizza instead and then went to bed early.

Today was another busy day. Many of us had the day off so we decided to go on a bus sightseeing tour. They were calling for rain all day but we got lucky and just had overcast instead. The first stop on our tour was the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately because it's winter there wasn't much to see because most of the plants were dead, but I still learned some new things. The next stop was the World of Birds sanctuary which has thousands of birds, monkeys and other animals. We were only there for about an hour and a half but I could easily have spent a whole day there. Many of the enclosures you were able to get quite close to the birds because they were not fenced in. The next stop was the Imizamo Yethu township, one of approximately 140 townships across the Cape Town area. We were given a guided tour by one of the residents named Ken. We were able to go into a couple of the houses and see how the people there live. There were many kids running around, trying to get our attention and some would even run up and give us hugs. Certainly made me appreciate what I have. We ended our tour where we started which was the V&A Waterfront which has many shops, restaurants, buskers and of course lots of boats. After walking around for a couple of hours we returned to the AVIVA house where we were prepared a delicious pasta dinner by the Italiens. I've been so spoiled this past week, don't know what I'll do when they leave!