#Travel

Now that I’ve presented the basic chronology of my #MeetSouthAfrica trip, I’m going to skip around a bit. I can’t wait another day to talk about my 24-hour visit Cape Town, which was sandwiched between longer stints in the Northern Cape and Durban.

I participated in #MeetSouthAfrica, a campaign sponsored by South African Tourism in which 14 travel bloggers split into three groups – the Luxury group, the Adventure group, and the Heritage group – and followed different routes around the country. I was in the Adventure group with Meruschka from Mzansi Girl, Melvin from Traveldudes, Matt from the Expert Vagabond, Caspar from StoryTravelers, and Kash from the Budget Traveller. We covered a massive swath of the country in a very short time and had an insane amount of fun.

I’m on Day 6 of my 10-day #MeetSouthAfrica trip. I intended to post on a regular basis during the journey but lack of time and wifi have prevented that. We’ve done so much. In the last three days alone I have crossed South Africa by bus from one end to the other (twice), learned to paddle a raft, made some awesome new friends, cooked my own gourmet meal in Cape Town, gone deaf in one ear (don’t worry Mom and Dad, I’m sure it’s temporary), and swam – yes swam – across an international border (twice).

I’ve been writing a lot about hashtags lately, which is a little embarrassing. Hashtags are so trendy. But sorry, I can’t help it. Once you’ve read this post you’ll understand my newfound hashtag passion.

This weekend I participated in a city immersion adventure in Joburg, tentatively named “Jozi, the Amazing Place”. Eight people spent 48 hours in downtown Joburg, traveling around on public transport and accomplishing various “missions” assigned by our hosts. In addition to carrying out the missions, we slept in dorm-style rooms at Curiocity Backpackers in Maboneng, hung out on the 52nd floor of Ponte City, drank copious quantities of Black Label on a pub crawl, and laughed a lot.

Some of you will probably feel cheated when you open this, thinking that I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro myself. Sorry to disappoint you. While I am an adventurous person and I think Kilimanjaro is beautiful (I’ve seen it from afar), I’m not particularly interested in climbing it. I’m content with hiking up smaller mountains, as I did in Lesotho.