South Africa Day 1: Table Mountain

I am very excited to finally be in South Africa. I have been looking forward to this for so long! This morning we all had to wake up very early because immigration officials boarded the ship at 6 am. They did random searches and had to meet with all of individually before the ship could be cleared. Then we had a diplomatic briefing and the diplomat scared everyone pretty badly with his horror stories. He told us about how dangerous South Africa is and not to ever bring anything valuable with you because people get violently mugged quite often. He also said never to go to the bathroom alone because an American student studying abroad got raped in the bathroom. He went on and on and it was very scary. After that we were allowed to get off the ship. Obviously the guy was trying to scare us into being careful but I think he went a little overboard.
Once we got off the ship Nancy and I decided to go to Table Mountain. We took a taxi there and rode the cable car up. You can either hike or ride the cable car but I heard the hike was extremely difficult so I opted to ride up. The cable cars are kind of like the ones at Stone Mountain except these rotate so you can get a good view of everything. We walked around on the top of the mountain for a while and took some pictures. We ran into Eloise later and we all had lunch together at the café. She started to hike with her group but she said it was too hard so she decided to ride up and wait for her group. She met up with them after lunch and Nancy and I went back to the waterfront.
The waterfront where she ship is docked is awesome! It’s so pretty and you definitely don’t feel like you’re in South Africa. There is a lot of security around the waterfront so it’s pretty safe. We got back and we walked around and shopped for a while. There are tons of shops and restaurants and it’s so close to the ship. At some of the other ports we had a good 20 minute walk so this was very nice. We had dinner on the ship that night and then went out and found some internet. I went to bed early because I had to be up early the next morning.