Posted by Amanda So, more on skydiving. I actually went skydiving! Another RD, Marsh Allen, went with me. Well, really it began with another one of the RDs being an avid skydiver. She tried to bring her parachute with her but security at the airport in the US got nervous about someone flying with a parachute and a one-way ticket. She had to leave it behind. Her excitement slowly started to infect others of us. She went in Brazil with one of the RDs. The...

Posted by Noah We were foiled in our first attempt to get to Table Mountain by high winds. As you may recall, we had already paid for a cab to get us to the cable cars, but arrived ten minutes after they had shut down. After returning from safari, we saw that a thick cloud layer was covering the mountain the next morning, so it would have been pointless to go then. That left us one day to see the defining feature of Cape Town. Luckily, our final day was a b...

posted by Noah The "table cloth" on Table Mountain was extremely thick today, so our plans to start the day there were foiled again. That meant we had all day to head to Simons Town to see the penguins on Boulder Beach. But first we headed to the pannekoeken place in the Waterfront to sample the Dutch-style pancakes we had enjoyed so much in Amsterdam. They had a limited breakfast menu, including only one pancake dish, a savory one with eggs and bac...

Posted by Amanda Another early morning game drive ended up catless. We got in Patrick's vehicle. Most of us in that one had missed the lions yesterday. It turned out that the gate from our camp into the park didn't open until 5:30 so we sat in the vehicles for a half hour. We did see some cool animals—a hyena trying to eat a turtle, a leopard tortoise which is one of the little five, and a buffalo in addition to the usual suspects of the giraffe and el...

Posted by Amanda We had a touch of a disappointing day today. We went out in the early morning for our first drive in Lucky's van. When he shuttled us from the entrance to our camp yesterday, it was great that he went fast. It meant we got a good tent. On a safari drive, it wasn't so good to go fast. We were the only van that didn't see a lion. We just zoomed along probably passing thousands of lions, but not seeing them. We did see some kudu, a million i...