South Africa Pictures and Movies

Alrighty! So, I've managed to get to a computer to upload some pictures, and inspired by Nick's recent addition of a rather funny and stupid video on his blog I have some videos for you as well!
These are just some pics from earlier in Durban and East London.
Durban Beach

The Hostel in durban

Which, although was under construction, had a pretty cool pool

Then onto east London where I stayed at the sugar shack on the beach which was really nice


we went sand boarding which was pretty cool, but since you have to walk back up the dune each time you ride down gets pretty old after a few goes.

Now, 2 days ago we hiked up Table Mountain. The Mountain overlooks Capetown from the south and the cape of good hope and false bay from the north and the view from the top is incredible. The hike up was a lot harder than I thought it would be, there's not really a trail as much as 1000 meters of carved out stone steps. It sucked, but like I said worth the view. This is from about halfway up.

Looking out over the Cape of Good Hope and False Bay

Yeah it was hot and we were tired, other people had their shirts off too



Just some more views of the city, bellow though is Robben Island. Its where the prison that housed Madella is.

the clouds come over the flat topped mountain and water fall over the edge

we didn't stay up for the sunset (it was too far away still) but the sky was still awesome looking west across the Atlantic.

Yesterday we woke up at 5:30 and went shark diving about 2 hours east of Capetown, fittingly enough off Danger Point. We did a little research and I figure that yes the diving has an effect on the sharks but after talking to a lot of locals here (even surfers) they don't think that it increases attacks or conditions them in any way. In fact once we were out on the boat it wasn't at all like the anti-dive people describe the shark activity. Where you have to practically beat the sharks away from the boat before you even chum because they live there and are used to the feeding. In fact they don't feed them at all and do as much as possible to keep the sharks from getting the bait. Legally they are only allowed to go through 10 fishheads in a day anyway so I think that it was ok. They said that the White Sharks are nomadic and very rarely would they get the same shark twice in a given period (they track em and stuff). Anyway we had to wait about 2 hours for any to come but when they did, oh man. We saw about 6 sharks the whole day. The first ones were pretty small, about 2-3 meters, but the last one that came and stayed with the boat for a while was at least 4.5 meters I thought. Really really really big fish, pretty scary really.

just before the first shark came, thinking how boring shark diving was and what a waste of money it is... wrong!
The first little baby one (yeah the others were way bigger)

once we got down into the cage i found that pictures weren't working that good so i started videoing and man are they cool

here's just a quick look at the cage (and the thinck wet suit, it was really cold)

the big momma checking out the food, pretty scary. How it works is there's a guy holding the rope to the bait and he keeps trying to get the shark as close to the boat and the cage as possible which is good. Every now and then the shark really goes hard at the bait and when its coming right at the cage (like this time) it can ram the cage pretty hard. Also after the shark get the bait in its mouth (if it can) it shakes its head all around and slashes in the water (I assume to kill it or something, maybe just to look scary and mean) anyway. This time it got a bit close to the cage and managed to get the bait which meant a wild ride for the people in it, which I happened to be one of.

Anyway, we're leaving for Namibia in a couple of days but I'll try to post again before that. Hope everything is great at home, miss ya.