The Burn and the Garden Route

The burn happened on a night before we were supposed to go into Monwabisi Park. We found out when we met downstairs in the morning that the community centre, youth centre, creche, soup kitchen, clinic and guest house, as well as the new back packers lodge that was under construction had all gone up in flames. This caused a wide variety of emotions, from anger and dispair to the desire to rebuild everything better than before. The cause of the fire was never actually discovered, but it was "determined" to be a candle tipping over, highly unlikely in a time of political unrest that a candle would demolish 80 shacks and buildings and render hundreds of people homeless. Part of the reason the fire was such a disaster was the flamibility of the construction materials of the shacks and the inability for fire trucks to access the site quickly. By the time the fire was put out, too much damage was done.

Even more disturbing is the fact that even now, the fire department has no desire to implement longer hoses or more fire safety plans, but instead stated that people could just use fire extinguishers. Di and Buyiswa have both been very strong throughout this process however, and believe that everything can be built back, stronger, more fire proof and better than ever. The burn site is difficult to see, the work of 10 years went up in flames, along with many peoples homes and livlihoods.

Now our projects have evolved to an Integrated Planning idea where we work to rebuild all of these buildings to be environmentally friendly and maximally effective. We are using our design and engineering skills to work on plans that we can show to city officials and potential donors so that they are more willing to approve the projeect and donate money. It is difficult, however, when our advisors sometimes disagree with our sponsors and there is a lapse in communication.

Our last free weekend in Cape Town was spent travelling the Garden Route, the N2 Highway up the coast from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape. It continues further up the Wild Coast, but we stopped at the eastern cape in the Tsitsikamma National Park. We left on Friday night and stayed in a backpackers lodge in Storms River. It was a long drive, but scenic, because our hired minibus driver drove way below the speed limit. We arrived at 1 am, and slept in triple bunk beds. We woke up early the next morning and travelled 20 minutes to the Bloukrans bridge, home to the highest commercial bungee jump in the world.

Walking out to the bridge was terribly scary. You travel on a narrow catwalk, and wear a safety belt. Before travelling out, they weigh everyone and write a label on their hands with this number. Luckily, its in kilos, so no one could tell how much anyone else weighed. Once out to the centre of the bridge, (some people ziplined there instead of walking), it was like a club. They encourage everyone to jump, and 4 people form our group did. At the last minute, I decided to... mostly because they told me that statistically it was the safest place in Africa, and because everyone said it wasn't as scary as they thought.

It was intense, falling for 8 seconds... a total of 203 m. But the whole process, bounces included is over in less than a minute. Bouncing was the worst... you're weightless and you arent sure when the drop will start again. That is incredibly scary. But the falling itself was just... fast. When you come ot a stop, someone is sent down on a rope to retreive you. I grabbed his legs and counted loudly the seconds until we reached the top of the bridge again. Hanging upside down waiting for him to arrive was by far the scariest part.

After the bridge adventure, we visited a water fall zipline, and did a zipline tour. That was more fun, and far less scary. Overall, the adventure weekend was a success and we toured the beautiful garden route of south africa.

Kruger Part 2

The safari started the next morning when we woke up at 5 am. The night was rough because we discovered scorpions in our shower and large burrowing spiders in the sand around our tents. The bartender talked to us about how many black mambas he'd seen in the past few years, and by the time I crawled into my tent, I was inspecting it for all of these undesirable animals. We also saw a large rhino beetle that was flying visciously, and was huge.

The safari itself was amazing. We saw four of the big five on the first day- elephants, rhinos, lions and buffalo, but we did not get to see a leapord. The big five are named as such because they are the five most dangerous animals in Africa. We also saw hippos, tons of zebra, impalas and giraffes. The lions we saw were sitting under a tree with their kill from the night before's hooves sticking up in the air. Which is really something you could only see in the wild, unlike the other safari that people went on where the lions were fed chicken daily in a certain place so they could be spotted easily. We drove around in greater than 100 degree F heat, and cooked our own meals and the African plains were as beautiful as I'd imagined. We cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast, and sandwiches for lunch, dinner varied each night but was usually pretty good. We took a night drive the first night of the safari, in a much larger tank like truck, as opposed to the pick up trucks with stadium seating we drove in during the day. Our guide was a middle aged Scottish man who was fun and knew a lot about the animals and the park, as he'd been a guide for 12 years. We didn't see any large cats on our night drive, which was slightly disappointing, but we did see lots of impala and other antelope hiding in the bushes.

At night we slept in Kruger park, and could hear hyenas rustling outside the fence around our tents. We had a large campfire both nights, and running water from a water tower near by that we climbed to watch the sun set. Hyenas are not tiny or cute. The first one I saw had a large amount of flesh torn from its shoulder and was much larger than a dog with broader shoulders. Supposedly they have one of the strongest jaws. The second day was similar, lots of driving, lots of animals, lots of pictures. The last day, we drove home- well back to Johannesburg where we flew home to St Johns.

On Sunday, we cooked a large Thanksgiving dinner for all the WPI students, as well as some of the St. John's staff. It was delicious, and made me more homesick than anything I'd done so far. Being away for Thanksgiving was easier when I pretended it wasn't happening, but when we ate it by ourselves in the lodge, it was fun but different and didn't feel like thanksgiving at all.

We recieved devastating news this week that our project centre, the Indlovu Project has burned to the ground. More details to follow on that.