Cape Town Day 2!

Day Two!

We had another fun filled day here in beautiful Cape Town. We got up this morning ready to take the ferry over to Robben Island at 9am. We were getting ready to eat breakfast at around 7:45am when some of The Team House employees asked what we had planned. We told them our Robben Island plans and they told us there was no way that we would make the 9am tour. It apparently takes a little longer to get there than we thought. We made a phone call and agreed to pay a little more to change our tickets to the 11am tour. We ate a delicious breakfast and got ready to leave around 8:45. We were on our way and the GPS turned off! We tried plugging it back it and playing around with it but it was not working. We did not have a map on us but we knew that we needed to go north. We asked cars next to us a few times for directions when we were stopped at the traffic lights but we made it! The ferry for Robben Island leaves from the V&A Waterfront. We went to the ticket office and got our tickets and then walked around a small bit of the waterfront because we had some spare time. Around 11am we boarded the ferry to head over to the island. The ferry had 3 decks to it but we were towards the back of the line so we got stuck on the bottom deck on the way to the island. It was a 30-minute ride to the island. Once we got on the island we got on a bus that took us on a tour of the island. We learned more of the history of the island and got to see the sites. The island was used for almost 400 hundred years to imprison slaves, political and religious leaders, mentally ill, leprosy sufferers, prisoners of war and most recently and what most people know it for, the political opponents of the apartheid in South Africa. After our bus tour we got to go into the high security prison and learn more about what life was like for the prisoners during the apartheid. The men that lead the tours of the prison were prisoners of the island themselves during the apartheid. It was fascinating to hear their stories. The highlight of the tour for most people is being able to see the cell that Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years on the island. It is crazy to think what life must have been like. I still have so much more to learn about the apartheid but this was really neat to learn about such recent history of South Africa. After the prison tour we headed back to the ferry. We were some of the first ones on the ferry so we got to sit on the top deck! We had a beautiful view of Table Mountain all the way back to the main land. We all agree that this 30-minute ferry ride was our favorite part of the day! We then spent the next two hours continuing to explore the waterfront. Late afternoon we decided we had enough and started to make our journey back. We decided that since we were going to pass the car rental place that we would see if we could switch out our faulty GPS. Well it turned out that the GPS was fine and it was the car that was faulty. So we ended up trading cars and we are driving a VW Polo I believe. It is not near as cute but Katy says that it is easier to drive so that is a plus. (Katy has been our driver here and we are giving mad props to this girl. She learned how to drive stick in South Africa when she got here 4 months ago. She is a champ in the city track, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and learning stick in a new car!) Once we were finished with our car/GPS drama we went to grab some dinner and head back to our place. We opted for the faithful Mugg and Bean for dinner and then enjoyed some time using our unlimited Internet. It was another fun filled day and we are already looking forward to what adventures we will have tomorrow!