KAYAKING WITH WHALES??

Sunday, October 2nd


So I’ve officially been in Cape Town for a full month! I cannot believe how fast this trip is going by and I have to say I’m not too happy about that! I’ve still been doing lots of awesome things with my time including going to Hermanus Whale Festival yesterday, celebrating Jenn’s birthday, and going to Kirstenbosch Gardens today.

On Friday we celebrated Jenn’s birthday with a party at Cubanas a restaurant/bar that our new friend Bunny organized. It was so cool of her to show us a “real South African” birthday and we all had a lot of fun. On Saturday we went to Hermanus a town that is well known for having over 80 whales swimming along its shoreline. We got there at 8 in the morning and I had scheduled a kayaking trip in the ocean at 9. I was sooo nervous at first because the waves looked gigantic and I could not stop thinking that I was going to be eaten by a shark! Four of us from UConn joined a group where our instructor told us the basics of kayaking and that it is really very safe. Jenn and I shared a kayak and I took the front of it. Once we got out in the water, our instructor had a radio and any time there was a whale spotting he would hear about it and we would kayak over to near where it was. We ended up seeing a good amount of whales breaching but none were ever really scary close. We also saw penguins and a seal just chilling in the ocean, which was really neat!! I actually wasn’t terrible at kayaking in the middle of the ocean surprisingly and didn’t even get sea sick. There ended up being one girl that got sick and had to lie down in her kayak while the instructor attached her kayak to his and paddled her around for the remainder of the tour. Lucky that didn’t happen to me! Soo glad we ended up doing the kayaking trip because it really wasn’t that scary, and such an awesome experience!!

After kayaking we had lunch and then went over to “treetop canopy slides” in the middle of the woods where we paid to zip line from tree to tree. I had never done zip lining before but after kayaking in the Atlantic Ocean I wasn’t too nervous about it. Ended up being a lot of fun, even though one girl ripped her pants, and we made friends with the zipine instructors so that they played music while we ziplined. Pretty fun.


Today I was supposed to hike Table Mountain, that giant scary mountain that is pretty much the staple of Cape Town. However, we got to the base of the mountain and the workers there said it was soo windy and dangerous that if you were to try and hike the mountain you would get blown right off of it! Needless to say we ditched that idea and decided to go to Kirstenbosch Gardens instead! It was still cold, but the flowers were beautiful and we had a nice and relaxing walk around the area, which I really needed after a busy weekend!