The story is long and engrossing, (includes yogis, mountain hideouts and dead bodies) but I made it to EBC (Everest base camp) and back in 10 days. Here are some photo’s will get the story up soon.
From Kala Patar 5500m.. Everest in the middle (black), Nupse or Lohtse is above me. I hiked the entire way in shorts.
Ama Dablam 22349ft. great pic…
So this had definitely been on my mind for something to do in S Africa. The only other two places you can do it are in Australia and Guadalupe Island in Mexico. So myself and another guy from the states (john) set out at 5am for the coastal village of Hermanus south of Cape Town. The drill is simple, they pick you up, drive you down for coffee, a briefing, and the all important release of any and all liability. 30 min later we were on a boat chumming the water for White Sharks.
So this is big business down in S Africa and there is a big debate by both sides on whether or not the sharks are more likely to bite people because of the cage diving experience. The crew had their set of statistics and the critics theirs, I guess I’m glad I don’t surf at the beach right where we were….actually nobody does, but some maniacs spearfish.
So after about 30-45 min of sitting at anchor a mile offshore, the captain spots a shark. He must have been wearing polarized glasses, because for the life of me I could not see it. All of a sudden we see this black shape circling the boat, sure enough its “the man in the grey suit”. About 3m long, I can’t believe it. You watch these Discovery channel shows starring Great Whites, and reality hits and I’m here and this sucker is swimming around the boat checking out the bait. If there was an old lady on board, I would have knocked her down to get in that cage.
So we are wearing 6mil wetsuits with booties and hoodies, I’m all decked out and the first guy out of 25 in the cage. My rational was who knows if this is the only shark that shows up today. We ended up seeing 7, the largest of which was probably around 4.5m and 800kg est. First the water was FREEZING, about 12 deg C. Sitting in the cage, I have a weight belt slung over my shoulder. I hold my breath and duck under the surface to take a look and cannot see a thing. We have about 10ft of visibility. So if I look really hard I can barely make out the bait. I pop up to the surface and have a huge ice cream headache and my hands ache with the familiar cold. We pile about 4 more people in the cage and now we are all sitting side by side cursing the cold and wind and waiting for the shark to make another pass. Next thing that happens is the captain yells “down, down!!!” so we all duck under the surface and seemingly out of nowhere this Great White just appears and makes a slow pass at the bait (two tuna heads) within 2 seconds he is gone and you see his tail flick once as he heads off into the darkness.
It almost happens too fast to register, I didn’t feel scared, there wasn’t a big boost of adrenaline, it was just like peek a boo, now you see him, now you don’t. Almost surreal. So this continues for another 15 min. A new shark arrives and just pops up, try’s to take the bait then disappears. All I can say is they are big, fast, and you never see them coming.
By now I’m frigid and I get out and stand on deck shivering and watch the same drill with everyone else. The view is generally much better from the deck, you see them coming from a distance. If the mate is fast enough, he is able to pull the bait away and lure the shark toward the cage, otherwise the shark clamps down and tries to hang on to the bait.
After everyone cycles through, I hop in for round two. I’m even colder this time. The skipper of the boat is making plenty of wisecracks at the 4 shivering touristas in the cage.
Overall a pretty unique experience, I could not imagine free diving with these guys unless you had about 40m visibility and could keep track of them and had a big ass spear gun. Even in a couple of sessions in the cage, you got a sense of their predatory behavior. They are clearly more cautious and scared of the boat than I imagined. They would take about 5 passes at the bait before trying to bite it. We did not experience the typical Discovery channel episode where they are leaping up (not breaching) behind the boat jaws agape . According to the crew your typical Discovery channel episode on “shark week” takes forever to assemble the footage for. The sharks were pretty mellow (this according to the skipper was due to water temp) they made slow approaches and were very cautious. The only time you saw jaws and thrashing was when the mate was too slow and they grabbed the bait. The crew allegedly never tries to give them the bait, so the sharks don’t associate the food with chum and humans in wetsuits….hmm. Needless to say, I didn’t try to follow up my successful Lion tail holding session with White Sharks.
Nice way to spend a morning and S Africa is the only place you can do it in less than a day and in under $200. I recommend packing lots of warm clothes for the ride home.
Up early, not really hung over and Lilly (my new physician friend on her way to Uganda) and I head up table mountain. Today is Sunday and also the date of the Cape Argus. The largest (most people) bike race in the world, Lance Armstrong is in town and they have basically shut off most of the roads throughout Cape Town. After getting slightly shafted by our cabbie we set out to hike up Table Mountain. 1 hour later we were on top. Great views.
After a little exercise we headed to Camps Bay to hit the beach grab some lunch and have a couple of cocktails with some other people.
Camps bay is really cool, a little bit of Malibu, a little bit of Miami a little bit of the French Riviera. Beach is beautiful, but man the water is COLD. I ran from camps bay around to Greenpoint a couple times so far this week, great jog with an ocean view.
Not a bad way to spend a day, if I had a little more boozing stamina we would have rallied at spent the eve clubbing beachside.
We (myself and my Canadian buddy Amir) headed down to the Cape point, where the Indian ocean meets the Atlantic. It was a beautiful visit, but really the entire drive down the coast through Houts bay and beyond was the highlight. South of Cape town the mountains jut up out of the water and create a spectacular scene of mountain meeting the southern oceans.
When we finally got down to the point, everything was fogged in so the view was not as spectacular as it could have been..but what the hell…who else gets to go down here. Then after a little drive further we got to go see the African Penguins. These guys are a crackup to watch, they all waddle around like 2 year olds. The few that we watched swim were amazing and then they quoted some unbelievable statistic that they down to 1500ft or maybe even meters. In either case it was pretty amazing. Like the dodo these guys are close to extinction, they have no natural fear of humans and most of their population decline has been due to habitat encroachment.
So midday on March 10th, I rolled into Cape town. So just about four months on the African continent. First impressions Cape Town is modern, cosmopolitan, and has a great deal of energy due to the upcoming world cup. It also has many faces, you have a downtown, a port, a developed waterfront, great suburbs, beachy resort communities, and a mountain right in the middle of the town. If I could compare it to anywhere is would be a combo of Miami, SF, and the French Riviera.
I kept the car through the rest of the week and did a bunch of sightseeing.
I have installed myself at a centrally located guesthouse and am making fast friends. Everyone is either starting their trip via Cape Town, or ending there so there is quite a bit of energy in all the visitors and guests.
So South Africa is famous for the “garden route” which is the equivalent of driving PCH in southern California. So after picking up my car I headed west to spend the night near Tsitsikamma park. There I did a nice hike the next morning in or around Mt. Tsitsikamma park and saw a little bit of the S african wilderness.
I skipped the largest bungee jump in the world at 216m and instead headed to an animal rehabilitation park. They do birds and small mammals but I went for the cats. This was the same as the Lion walk, however most of the animals that I got to see were too socialized with humans to go back into the wild. They are used primarily to raise money and to aid the rehab the other animals. So there are a couple of token animals that are basically for show, better than a zoo for sure but not quite free. Aside from the leopard they all basically receptive to visitors.
This guy was spectacular, at 15 mos old he had the most amazing coat I’ve seen and it took us a couple of minutes to find him. For some reason these big cats have almost a dog like personality. Respond to their names, like to play, like affection. (no so much with the leopards). So this guy had a play toy in the form of a plastic water jug, in about 5 min I watched him tear it apart. Leopards grip with the front claws, bite, and try to shred everything with their rear claws. Impressive, this was much closer than we saw them in the seregenti.
Just watching the cheetahs walk around is amazing, everything about these cats is built for speed. Huge shoulders and rib cage, very impressive to see up close.
Caracal. I petted this guy, feels just like a housecat but about the size of a smallish mountain lion.
After the park I drove through Plett the S African equivalent of La Jolla and Knysa which is a little bit more like Sausalito/Tiburon. Both are very cool beach towns within a days drive from Cape town and the interior.
I ended up spending the night in Wilderness at a nice little organic guest house and then we had dinner with 71 Argentine female field ball players on tour. It was hard to stay focused during that meal.
After a week in Jbay and only three hours in the water and a wicked sunburn to show for it I had to get out of dodge. Getting out of Jeffries Bay is much harder than getting in. For the first time on the trip I have resorted to hitch-hiking. The family that runs the place that I am at is incredulous….again. These guys are the coolest family on the planet, Gary, Cristal, Dave and Cindy. Stay at CristalCove if you are ever in Jeffries Bay and have a couple of beers with Gary, it is well worth the trip.
Among the cast of characters I met was Bruce Gold aka the Brucifer. He is the most well known guy in Jeffries Bay. He looks like some dude out of lord of the rings and can surf. Nice guy and a definite character, after a couple of beers I could not understand a word he said.
I also met Adam, a former Zimbabwean farmer. He is now the first of two Zimbabwean refugees I’ve met in South Africa. Talk about bar tales, I got to hear how his family was forced off their farm by a Zimbabwean general who wanted it as country house. This shit really happens down here, the guy showed up sat down and had tea and said you have two hours to leave everything you own and have worked for over the past 15 years, by the way I know where your kids are right now and if you don’t comply you will never see them again. Welcome to Africa.
So despite her protests, Cristal decides to collaborate and helps me with my hitchhiking plans. She makes me a sign that says “TO PE” in big black letters on a spare piece of paper. I am picked up in about 5min and on the way to PE in the back of a pickup truck. No problem, I pickup my rental car sourced by Gary (thank you very much) at the airport and am back in Jbay in an hour I get my luggage say my goodbyes and am heading west on the Garden Route in my new hot rod.
So after 18 hrs in Port Elizabeth I am headed to Jeffries Bay, home of Supertubes and the where the Billabong pro is hosted every July. I am psyched to get back to the beach and relax for a little while. 1 hour later in a shared taxi, I arrive. The girl at the front desk is appalled, I mean absolutely speechless that I got there in a shared ride taxi. Apparently they are supposedly dangerous, I know South Africa has a high crime rate but I am somewhat noticing that a culture of fear that permeates how the whites here look at things.
Relax is exactly what I get in Jeffries, I surfed for about 1 hour on my first day and it has been horrible conditions since. Wind is 20-30 knots onshore and the ocean is full of whitecaps and un surfable. I bide my time by reading mystery novels and socializing with the locals and other residents of the guesthouse. My favorite character thus far is Dave, he is the son of the owner and is part time runs the place. That is, he bartends and helps out when it is convenient (it is only convenient when there are cute twenty-something girls around..I like his thinking). This guy is the original Spicolli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, amazing resemblance to Sean Penn’s character. Surprisingly he has never seen the movie and after my description is now eager to get his hands on a copy.
I arrived on Monday and we don’t get surf until Friday, I managed to get sunburned on Thursday so this makes my outing into the water a little uncomfortable. There is no sunburn, like a southern hemisphere sunburn. It must be something about the lack of ozone but I always get scorched south of the equator.
On Friday eve the wind dies down and Supertubes goes from a nice big right hand crumbling wave in the early eve to a pitching barrel in about 30 min as the wind goes offshore. I brought the wrong board for the job. We get a solid 2 hours of surf and I struggle in at sundown. That was it, 3 hours in the water and maybe 10 good waves total in 5 days, glad I came but if this is the pace of things around here I have to get moving.
Overall Jeffries bay is a really nice little town of maybe 35,000 that reminds me of a cross between San Clemente and the Outer Banks of NC. Real estate is CHEAP here, everything is cheap in S Africa. The Rand is 7.5 to the dollar right now and you can buy a nice 3 Bedroom ocean view for about $100k-120k USD. I have not been to a McD’s here yet but I would guess the Big Mac index is about at a $1.50. An ice cream cone is $0.35, it was $1.50 in Uganda. Beachfront real estate on a spectacular beach starts at about $300k. This is probably cheaper than what I saw in Zanzibar. I drove around with a realtor on one of the slow days and he showed me the lay of the land. There are no Hotel’s in Jbay, just self-catering “guesthouses” which means a room or two with kitchenette. These set you back between $20-30USD per night. I arrived right in the offseason, so it is not crowded and def slow. If things were a little more lively and the conditions were better this would be a great place to stay for awhile on the cheap. It probably rivals my experience in S and Central America with better infrastructure and amenities.
I am plotting my next move in the next couple of days probably west along the garden route towards Capetown. So far South Africa is very, very nice. This is definitely Africa for beginners, beautiful, cheap and easy to get around. My experience with the locals (English, Afrikaans and Blacks) is probably substance for another lengthy post.
After 3 months in Eastern Africa arriving in Tambo international is like traveling in time. I feel like I have been thrust into the 21st century again. In 30 min in Tambo I was able to change money, buy lunch, buy a new Sim card, and buy a new South African power converter. Anywhere else in East Africa and these tasks would have easily taken up most of the day. I decided to postpone my trip to Jozi and Durban and head straight for Port Elizabeth and the sunshine coast. Everyone I have talked to says skip Joburg if you can, so I am.
20 min after walking to the ticket desk I am ticketed and on the next flight to port Elizabeth. I arrive in Port Elizabeth 2 hours later and take a cab to my hotel, go for a jog on the boardwalk and go to dinner at the only place within walking distance which seems to be the South African equivalent of TGI Fridays. I am back in civilization again, no more bucket showers, no more touts, Port Elizabeth feels like Long Beach CA, a nice but gritty coastal port town.
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