Activity, at last!

Well, it's been an interesting week and a half since my previous update!

I have, first off, been to many exciting places and seen some really cool things. Last weekend I spent a day traveling the coast south of Cape Town with my housemates, and we had a great day at Boulders Beach and the Cape of Good Hope. Boulders Beach was really fun because it is the home of an African penguin colony, and the cute little buggers toddled in and out of spaces between boulders and the water... adorable!


After spending an hour or so with the cutest penguins at Boulders Beach, we moved on to the Cape of Good Hope for a couple of nice hikes. This is, of course, the most southerly point in Africa and it was fun to stare off across the ocean in the direction of the south pole. There is just something a bit magical about being at the end of the world, with nothing between you and Antarctica. Now, this is actually the second time I've been able to say that, because I had the same experience in Australia on Kangaroo Island. However, the moment did not lose any of power for me. I think I will now have to put Argentina on my list of future travel destinations (not on the Watson, but some other time) just so that I can say I've been to all the most southerly points in the world. And Antarctica, of course, but that's a tough one to swing. I'll have to become a brilliant environmental scientist to get a trip there, I think.

Last week also turned out to be quite busy work-wise. Not that SAEP actually found much for me to do. I really ended up being most useful as a handy-man type figure, hanging paintings and cleaning up the offices to impress our "important visitors." Thursday and Friday were actually holidays for the schools as well, so no work for me then!

My HUGE breakthrough came completely by mistake. I was looking up a marimba band that I had a lead on here in Cape Town when I stumbled across another that was described as "one of the best marimba bands in South Africa"! So, of course, I had to follow up on it. Turns out that this group, amaAmbush Marimbas, is exactly what I have been hoping to find here in Cape Town. They are a group that performs regularly but mostly they build marimbas and teach in various schools around Cape Town. What's more, I contacted them and got an immediate reply. I am so excited! I got to meet everyone there and play a bit on their marimbas, which was fabulous. They don't have the range of the ones we play in the states and the bands are comprised of fewer instruments (at least, the amaAmbush bands are) but it is real marimba with completely new music, and they are totally excited to get me involved.

So, life actually seems quite perfect at the moment, except for the nasty cold that I am suffering from! But I think everyone gets this cold... at least, all my housemates assure me that they got it a few weeks after arrival as well. But sniffles aside, I hope that my next few weeks will be much more marimba-active than the past few! I just got an invitation to come along to a gig tomorrow where the amaAmbush performing band is playing, so that ought to be a lot of fun too.

And how could I forget to mention my near-death experience? Thursday was a day off from work, so a few of my housemates and I decided to go hiking on Table Mountain (picture to the right, the tallest peak). That seems great, right? Except that our guide (one of my Dutch housemates) didn't do an adequate job of preparing us for this trip. It wasn't actually a hike at all, at least half of it would be better described as a climb. We had absolutely no safety gear and had to scramble up rock faces and sheer cliffs, sometimes with the help of a chain that had been hung to assist on the really impossible parts. My fear of heights nonwithstanding, this was definitely the most deliberately reckless thing I have ever done, and potentially the most dangerous. I can't believe that this was an official route up the mountain, and I have no idea why my housemate thought we would be able to do this just for fun (the photo on the left is of my climbing buddies, but this wasn't even one of the dangerous bits)! Luckily, just as we were coming to the last really difficult part of the climb we were overtaken by two very experienced climbers who had been on the route many times before. This was especially lucky, because even though we were almost at the top a cloud had just swept over the mountain at our elevation and the last chain was becoming slick from the moisture in the air. I have never in my life been so terrified, and I think I will never do anything like that again without safety ropes and an experienced guide. Actually, I think that next time I will take the cable car to the top of the mountain!

But that's about everything I've been up to so far! More of my photos can be found on GrinnellGallery (which you do not have to be associated with Grinnell to view) at http://www.grinnellgallery.com/viewAlbums.do?uid=4c8d8b5a126bfb160112b6e8ea8a1a17 (or just go to http://www.grinnellgallery.com/ and type "parkersa" into the "read" box on the left side).