God's Gift in Cape Town - by Jessica (August 30)

I can't believe that we are leaving today. Sitting in the airport, it seems as if we were just here, starting our journey, although that didn't seem to be the case on a couple of our long overland travel days.
We've been in Cape Town for the last couple of days, South Africa was an add-on because we had an extra couple of days, and had to fly through here anyway.  I am so glad that we visited. It's a beautiful city (a real city!) What a beautiful city, we would definately come back because due to our short time, we missed the Cape of Good Hope, wine tours, the garden route, and other things.  The first day we were here, we did a hop-on, hop-off bus tour and got to see the great city!  We went part of the way up Table Mountain, but the cable car was closed (and we didn't feel like hiking) so that was as far as we went, it was still a nice view.  I was very impressed that the Table Mountain area is one of seven (?) different flora areas in the whole world!  Things were just starting to bloom (spring was around the corner).  We spent some time in the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, having a fancy dinner and enjoying the ambiance.  Yesterday we went down to Hansbaai - down in the very southern tip to go... Shark diving!  We were in a cage swimming with between 6-7 Great White Sharks in the southern Atlantic.  (Yes, it was very very cold).  They came very close, and one even banged right up on the cage while Krystal was in it.  The largest we saw was 4.7 metres (around 6 metres being the longest ever).  Three times they breached the water with teeth bared, but I never ended up getting a picture of that.  Today before heading out to the airport we took the ferry out to Robbin Island - a place of so much history, including a prision where Nelson Mandela served half of his prison sentence.  It was an inspirational place.  The island was home to a colony of African penguins and seals.  We were supposed to have time to walk out to visit them, but our tour ran long - we had the oppourtunity to talk to a prison guard who worked with Mandela (our tour guide was a prisoner there for a couple of years as well)  so walking back to the ferry I was quite disapointed about not having the time to see them, I had been looking forward to them for a while.  As we were just about to walk into the port to get on the ferry, one appeared in the path in front of us.  A young penguin, alone, allowed us to walk right up to him and say hi.  He is forever named in my mind as Gift - he was God's gift to us - a farewell from the amazing contenent of Africa.