Monday, April 1, 2013

A Day in Johannesburg, South Africa

March 24, 2013


Oh how killer is the jet lag. I woke up again at 6am, and couldn't sleep any longer. They had $15 breakfasts that you could go down to the restaurant for, or you could order up a three dollar sandwich, fries and salad and get it delivered to the room. Hello chicken pesto sandwich for breakfast. I ordered up two thinking that Matt would eat his when he woke up.

We had spent the night in this beautiful hotel in Illovo, a nice part of Johannesburg. We were so thankful for a cozy bed after another evening of travel, so we hung out in the room until we had to check out trying to catch up on our sleep.

We stored our luggage at the front desk and headed odd to find a place to replenish our snacks and get some lunch. We found a nice little lunch spot with delicious African food and rose water and mint lemonade. A tastebud tingler to say the least.

Our snack run introduced me to biltong, African jerky. This particular one was springbok. Delicious. Our other favorite thing to do when we travel is test out the potato chip flavors of other countries. Caribbean onion and vinegar is pretty much our new fav.  It's like a tangy and sweet salt and vinegar - my very favorite chip in the world.

We headed to the airport at a very fast pace. I wish I could have filmed the meter in the taxi. The man was going 130 km/hr on the highway and taking all three lanes to makes the curves. The meter was cranking away counting up and up like a slot machine, but we were gambling with more than a couple quarters. I tightened my seatbelt and found myself with the same thought that I've found myself thinking a few times on this trip during uncomfortable travel situations: if I died right now, would I be okay with that?

Most times, I've answered with a big fat no because I would be too sad to miss out on all the happenings that would happen after I left this amazing world. At this point, I realized how morbid my thoughts were and went back to happy thoughts of not crashing on the highway and how happy I'll be when we get to the airport and out of this cab.

We arrived safely and then waited for quite some time for our plane.  Not only were we early, it was delayed, so we entertained ourselves watching people and eating our snacks that we had bought earlier in the day during our snack run.

Our flight was late, and by this point, I was very sick of riding on planes.  We ate our 9:30pm dinner and listened to the British girls behind us jabber on about boys.  We got in late to the airport and made it to our hotel around midnight relieved to finally be in Cape Town to meet the ship.  We made it to our awesome hotel room and realized that there was a laundry machine in the room.  We dug out our plastic, quarantined bags of laundry and stuff them in.  Our plan for the next day was to film the ship coming into port because there would not be another chance to do so since we're always on the ship when it takes off and lands in port.  We figured we would have to get up pretty early to find the location and set up to film.  We set a couple alarms to wake up and switch the laundry, but found the night to be restless, and we ended up not needing alarms.  One of us was up every hour or so.  What's the line?  You can sleep when you're dead?  I think that's only true for people with access to exorbitant amounts of caffeine.  I want to sleep right now!

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