That being finished, we ate some breakfast, packed up our bags one last time, and got our cab to the airport around 11:25am. The flight to Jo’burg was pretty uneventful, although it was an easy one, only being 2 and a half hours. We were preparing for a 4-hour layover before our next flight at 9:15pm. Naturally, there was a bit of a snag. We attempted to get a VAT refund, as South Africa allows tourists to recoup the 14% tax on goods costing more than ~$30 that are purchased while in the country. We had a few such items that we could claim, so we took them to the counter to have the receipts and goods inspected. Easy enough, right? Not quite. The officer there approved the receipts with a stamp, and told us we needed to go to another stand inside security to get the money. Ok, no problem.

We went to go check in for the flight, only to find an absolutely massive line. There seemed to be a much shorter line for people who had already checked-in online, which we hadn’t done. However, having this trusty netbook on hand allowed us to do just that. Except, of course, that the free internet was in the other terminal. Deciding that it would be faster to trudge to Terminal B than wait in the line, we headed that way to get some internet and then check in for both the flight to London as well as the flight to Chicago. After 45 minutes, we managed to pull that off, and headed back to the check-in area, which now had an even longer line. Luckily, Rocio and Ryan both had status with British Airways, so we were able to bypass most of the line and got our bags checked in quickly.

After passing through security, we went to find the place to get our VAT money. Of course, the line was out the door. There were roughly 40 people ahead of us and only 4 counters, and for some reason, what seemed to me to be a very simple task was clearly the opposite. There were a ton of Algerians in line who didn’t speak very much English, and the South African staffers were really not being very helpful, because whenever they would ask for something that the Algerians didn’t understand, they would revert to the tried-and-true solution of saying the same thing louder. It worked as well as you think it would. After nearly an hour of waiting in line amongst people who don’t understand the concept of personal space, along with some rising tensions amongst others from people perceived to be cutting in line, we finally got the money. Just kidding, no we didn’t. We got a check in Rand that was “Non-transferrable, non-negotiable” – basically funny money – minus a fee somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%, which could only be cashed at the special money-changing place conveniently located just next door.

Meanwhile, it’s now less than an hour before our flight is supposed to leave. Thankfully, the bank line is shorter, and when I got up to the agent, I asked if I could get the money in US dollars. She said, no, it’s too small an amount. Granted, I was only set to get $10 back initially, but she said it was going to be a roughly $15 fee to give out US dollars. Instead, I got money in Rand, except that I noticed she took out considerably less money than what the check read. This, of course, was because the bank took out a freaking THIRD of the money due us as a fee. So, in the end, I wasted over an hour of my time for $5. If you are ever in a country that offers this, do not waste your time unless you’re expecting to get back a few hundred dollars. Talk about a scam.

After that fiasco ended, I’m sitting here at the gate awaiting departure to London. 11 hours for this flight, and most likely very few of it coming in sleep form for me. Oh well.

written by  nucappy on June 25, 2010 from Johannesburg, South Africa
from the travel blog: London and South Africa - World Cup 2010!
tagged SouthAfrica and Joburg
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After breakfast, we made our way down to the offices of Downhill Adventures, the group that was leading our trip for the day. We showed up at 9am ready to go, but as we've discovered, South Africans have a different concept of time. We waited around in the office for them to get ready, and didn't make it up to the mountain until close to 10am. The mountain, mind you, is about 3 km away.

Once we got up to the cable car base station, the bikes were unloaded and we hopped on them to practice and make sure that everyone was comfortable with shifting gears and peddling on them. Since this was a tour for beginners, it was understandable that they'd want to do this. The bikes were click-shifters, and seeing as how I ride my bike at home all the time, I figured this would be easy and I was ready to go. The girls got their bearings on their bikes and it was time for the four of us plus our four guides to go on a practice run.

We began the trail, and it was pretty damn steep. Now, in the brochure, it said that the biking was going to be 10% uphill, 90% downhill. According to the guides, it was going to be roughly 30% uphill, 70% downhill. According to reality, it was closer to even. That aside, within the first 10 minutes of going downhill down the trail, I squeezed my front brake a bit too hard and pitched myself right over the handlebars. Way to go, Mr. Experienced Bike Rider. I only got a small cut on my right hand, and the skin was still mostly covering it, so I cleaned it as best I could and soldiered on. I had taken a couple puffs from my asthma inhaler before starting, and needed a couple more before we'd even gone halfway on the so-called practice run, as we were going up at a ridiculously steep climb, and, not having mountains in Chicago, I was not properly in shape for such an endeavor.

After walking up most of the uphill back towards the cable car base station and riding very slowly up the other part, we were able to take a quick rest to catch our breath again. It wasn't easy though, because there were so many cars passing through the area and the car exhaust fumes were seriously not helping me out at all. Once we finally got past that area, we were on the road going slightly uphill - much easier than what we had previously been doing. We were headed towards an area of Table Mountain called Devil's Peak. No one was really certain how it got its name, but by the end of the day, I would have my own theory.

At a certain point, the road became closed to cars due to rockslides, but we rode on up it anyway until we got to a point where the road ended, and another trail began. The views of the city were absolutely beautiful, as the mountains totally surround the city, and we got our first views of the stadium, though it was still a bit foggy and I wasn't able to get great shots from up high. At noon, a canon goes off from Signal Hill, which is the northern-most peak of the range, and it went off just before we were about to start down the trail. We could see the smoke rising from where it fired, and at that point, it was time to continue onward.

I felt pretty good starting down the trail, as it was fairly straight, not too steep, and I was getting a better handle on the brakes. Naturally, I spun out almost instantly and slipped down, but no damage there. We continued on for a bit, going over some bumps and struggling to maintain control of the speed, but everything was going well and it was fairly exhilarating. We stopped at one point to let everyone catch up, and then continued on down the hill. At this point, things got dicey.

We were on a part of the trail that was more rocks than dirt, and the bike tends to slip a bit while braking. I had been behind Sara and decided that I wanted to get out in front of her to be able to go at my own speed. Let's remember that this was on a downhill portion of a slippery slope that was difficult to brake on. As I passed her, another one of those bumps came up that you're not supposed to brake on as you go over it, because if you do, when you come down, your bike stops suddenly. Naturally, I hit the brakes as I went over it. When I came down, my front wheel stuck in the trail like it was a javelin stuck into the ground, and I promptly flew right over the handlebars yet again and went face-first right into the rocks on the ground.

I got up to find that my pants were scuffed, my shirt sleeve was torn at the hand, my right hand, which previously only had 1 cut, now had about 4 big ones and 6 or so other small ones. My left hand had a small cut, and apparently my chin was bleeding. I got up, felt a bit woozy for about 5 seconds, took some water, and then the guide looked at my face and his expression went from a smile to a bit of horror. Apparently I had gashed my chin open nice and good, and he thought I needed to get some stitches. Seeing as how we were still on a mountain, there was only one way to get to a place that could stitch me up, and that was to ride downhill. Luckily one of the guides had some band-aids, and covered my chin up as best he could for the rest of the ride. Somehow, this is the kind of thing that would happen to me.

I managed to make it down the rest of the ride without incident, and went through town the rest of the way back to the office where we were going to eat lunch before the abseil. After some more workers inspected my chin, they all concurred that I needed stitches as well, so while Ryan, Rocio and Sara stayed behind to eat lunch, Martin, our lead guide, drove me up to the clinic to get fixed up. I was hoping to be able to make it back for the abseil, but I didn't want the others to miss out because of my inability to properly control my bike.

I was told to go to the emergency room, so I went over there and filled out the paperwork, then waited until they took me back. The nurse told me I needed to shave the area around the wound so that she could get to it better, and handed me a straight razor to do the job. Now, I use an electric razor at home. In fact, I've managed to never use a straight razor for shaving in my life. So now I figured, great, I'm going to mangle my chin even further while doing this. The nurse was very encouraging though, and I managed to clean everything off without further nicking myself. The razor, on the other hand, was nice and bloody, so that was just delightful.

While going back to the hospital bed, I noticed there was a pump sitting in the corner that looked familiar. Sure enough, it was a Baxter Colleague pump - the hospital is a Baxter hospital. I wasn't exactly certain what to think about that....but I didn't need to use the pump, so it was all ok. After telling my story to the nurse and the doctor, I was given some lidocaine and stitched up with 3 stitches to close up the wound. For my hands, they asked if I would be okay with them using something called Mercurochrome or "monkey blood". It can't be used in the States since it has a low amount of Mercury in it. I didn't care at this point, so I had them smear it on my hand. Now my hand is nice and bright red. They wouldn't take my insurance, but even though this was the emergency room of a private clinic, the total bill was just over $100. Brilliant.

Upon arriving back at the Downhill Adventures office with stitches firmly in chin, I was relieved to discover that the rest of the gang hadn’t left for abseiling yet, so I was still able to go with them. We climbed back in the van and went up to the base station, but this time, we were getting on the cable car and traveling up to the top of Table Mountain, roughly 1000 meters high (~3250 feet). As we ascended, the floor inside the car rotated around so we got great views of both the mountain and the city as we were lifted higher and higher until we got off at the top, where the wind was quite evident.

The guys at Abseil Africa were right there once we got outside the cable car station, and as I peered over the edge, I couldn’t quite see where we were going to be descending from. They explained that once we had our harnesses on, we would climb over the wall, attach ourselves to a safety rope, and make our way around to the actual point of descent. The instructor explained in great detail the safety features of the mechanism and how there was literally zero chance that we could do anything to hurt ourselves while climbing down. Even with all of the explanations and assurances, Rocio declined to go with the rest of us, even though she planned the activity herself. As a result, there were only 3 of us, and since they only run in pairs, one of us had to be the odd man out and go solo. That person was me. Granted, I volunteered to go solo, so it’s not like it was forced upon me or anything. For some reason, and I don’t know if it was due to the earlier biking incident that had my adrenaline pumping or not, but I wasn’t frightened, even though I was standing on a piece of rock that was roughly 2 feet wide at best, holding onto a rope attached to another rock, staring out into the abyss.

The abseil itself was 112 meters (~360 feet) and apparently only a 5 or 10 minute activity, depending on how fast the person went, so it wasn’t like I had to wait that long of a time to get hooked up to go, but it sure did feel like a long time. They asked me which rope I wanted to use, and I told them whichever one makes me have to walk less to get to it. They hooked me in nice and tight, and then it was time to walk backwards into oblivion. Right as I took the first few steps, a HUGE gust of wind blew me a bit to the side, which really got the heart beating, and as I steadied myself and began to descend, there was no going back. I was given a helmet, which I doubt would do any bit of good had something catastrophic happened, and gloves, which were a bit too big for my hand and therefore made it quite difficult to control the rate of my descent. We were supposed to keep our hand at our hip and let the rope feed through it as we climbed down, but I kept having it creep up in front of me, at which point I’d bring it back down to my side. Thankfully, I could tell that the guys at the top were having more success controlling my speed, so I stopped worrying about it and kept walking.

The other tricky thing was making sure to keep my feet below my waist so that I didn’t wind up upside-down on a mountain-side. That, I was successful in doing, so on the whole, I’d say I did a pretty solid job for having never done this before. I took a couple of glances to my side where I could see what was somewhat below me, but never looked completely downward. No thank you. As I continued to walk down the rock, all of a sudden I took a step – and there was no more rock. Well, there was some rock, but it was approximately 20 feet away, and there was no chance I could get over to it. So now, I’m wondering what exactly the hell I’m supposed to do, at which point the rope spins me around to face the ocean and the town next to it as I’m slowly lowered down the remainder of the drop while getting to enjoy the view. Talk about a “Holy Shit” moment. I heard Ryan calling up to me, so I looked down at that point to see him on the ground, as well as the landing point for me. They didn’t mention that part in the brochure, I know that much, but it was pretty damn cool once the shock wore off.

Of course, now that we were at the bottom, we had to get back up to the top…so we could go back to the bottom of the mountain. The guys at the top said it would be a 25 minute walk up to the top. Much like how the mountain biking was only “10% uphill”, this information was wildly inaccurate as well. To start, the “path” that we were supposed to take was exceedingly dangerous and oftentimes we were within inches of tumbling 3000 feet to our death down the mountainside. There were big rocks to climb over, muddy rocks that were easy to slip on, and a few times not even a clear designation of where to go next. I kept wondering if maybe somehow we’d missed the real path and were on some other crazy path, but we never saw any other path that we could take, so we continued onward.

We had been walking for roughly half an hour before we encountered 2 tourists who, for some inexplicable reason, were making their way down the path that we were going up, and they told us that it was another 20 minutes to the top. Some 25 minute walk. Shortly after we passed them, there was a sign facing the direction of people going down the path. The sign’s message? “THIS IS NOT AN EASY WAY DOWN”. Yeah, no shit. As we went further onward and further upward, we finally started to get to the top, at which point we saw another sign, again facing towards travelers who would be descending. This one read “WARNING: Extremely dangerous route with steep rock climbing and difficult navigation. DO NOT attempt this route if inexperienced. Use at own risk.” Wow. Thanks guys, for letting us know that we’d be put on an expert hiking trail to return to the top. Finally, after roughly 50 minutes of strenuous, stressful hiking, we made it to the top and headed to the cable car to get the hell out of there and back down on the ground.

At this point, it was after 4pm and we were missing the US match, so our guide from Downhill Adventures, who didn’t go up the mountain with us, went to get the van to take us back to the hotel. Luckily, there was enough time for me to buy my own vuvuzela with the South African flag wrapped around it in decal-form. Perfect for tomorrow night’s match. We finally made it back to the hotel, where we ran up to catch the final minute of the first half, only to see that it was 0-0. Ugh. On the way back, we had learned that England was winning 1-0, so we absolutely needed to win to advance to the next round. It was bad enough that we hadn’t scored, but then we learned that Dempsey’s goal was disallowed thanks to another crap referee decision, and it just felt like it was going to be 2006 all over again.

The second half of the match was an exercise in increasing stress as the minutes melted away on the clock with the score remaining 0-0. Ryan was on the bed with Rocio, while I was sitting in the desk chair to the side – my usual spot for sports watching as it allows me to repeatedly jump up in anticipation of something happening. Every missed opportunity by the US, every near-chance for Algeria, every whistle by the referee – everything wound tighter and tighter. Meanwhile, Slovenia was doing nothing to challenge England, as it seemed like every time we flipped to the other channel the ball was deep in Slovenia’s end or England had possession. I was keeping track on ESPN while we were watching our match as well. When Dempsey hit his ball of the post and then blasted wide, I was sure that we were headed for 0-0 and a quick exit in disgrace out of the tournament.

The minutes crept into the 80s and still, nothing. Donovan had been absent the entirety of the half, the defense was shaky, Altidore wasn’t doing much when he got the ball, and Edson Buddle had headed wide on an earlier opportunity. Closer and closer to the end we came, and the stress increased further, and further, and further some more. And then, out of nowhere, comes Landon Donovan, savior of America, to slot the ball into the corner of the net. I don’t know if he could be seen on the HD feed running to the ball, but we sure as hell had no idea that anybody was there until he came storming in to slam the ball home and send us through to the next round. Unbelievable. Ryan jumped off the bed, I jumped out of the chair, we hugged, yelled, screamed. The vuvuzela was unleashed outside the room – it was complete and utter elation. Not only had we won the match, but we won the group as well, and all of a sudden, the matches tonight mattered a lot.

We decided to make our way down to the Fan Fest to watch the match between Germany and Ghana since we hadn’t been there previously and it was supposedly packed the night before. Since it was only 2km away, we walked there, and went down one of the main streets for nightlife in Cape Town. Tons of restaurants, bars, people having a good time. I was wearing my US jersey, and every USA fan that we passed along the way gave high-fives, fist-bumps, chants of U-S-A and so on. It was a fully festive atmosphere. There was a double-decker bus circling the streets painted in England colors with girls on the back dancing to music that was playing which passed us while we ate some burgers before we continued on to the Fest. Once we got there, it was pretty underwhelming, as there weren’t all that many people around to watch. They did have cheap beer (only $2.50) that wasn’t Budweiser, and that’s all that mattered. Ghana and Germany played a largely uneventful match, with Germany and Australia thankfully winning, allowing the US to have Ghana as its next opponent. Ghana has yet to score a goal that wasn’t a penalty shot in this tournament, and so compared to the hand that fate dealt England (Germany first, with the winner of Argentina-Mexico to follow), I feel pretty good about our chances to continue onwards. Unfortunately, as the only African team remaining, the USA will be going up against an entire continent on Saturday when they play.

Finally exhausted from the intensity of the day, we took a cab back to the hotel as soon as I got some antibiotic cream for my cut-up hands. Thankfully, tomorrow is a calm day and the potential for injury is quite low. We’ll be heading to the District 6 museum and Robben Island to learn us a little history.

written by  nucappy on June 23, 2010 from Cape Town, South Africa
from the travel blog: London and South Africa - World Cup 2010!
tagged SouthAfrica, CapeTown and WorldCup
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