Penguins and wine and cheetahs and whales (pt.2/4)

I bungee jumped on Saturday. I have no pictures. I have no video. I have nothing that proves it other than a certificate of accomplishment and stories of a very interesting car ride. Jeff, Ben, and I were the only three in the entire hostel willing to try a jump. Gabe, John, Sin, and Massi (i'm naming them individually for the embarrassment) couldn't muster enough manliness to join us.

Anyway, the morning started out normal as the three of us got ready to head out to Bloukran's Bridge, the highest bungee site in the world. The bad part is it's located six hours away from Cape Town so we had to rent a car to get there. Our plan was to drive out there, make the jump, and drive back before it got too late. We couldn't stay the night since we all had events planned for the next day. If we left at the 8:30AM--we reasoned--we could get there by 2:30, jump by 4:30, and get back around 11PM. Like all time-sensitive plans, this one went to waste.

The car rental company changed its mind about a single day rental once they found out how far we were going. You should have seen the guy's face when we told him we were planning on driving through the night to return the car by tomorrow…apparently, no one here does that. After he referred us to a different company (we didn't tell this one how far we were going), we were on our way at 10AM--much later than anticipated.

Driving on the wrong side of the road was…not as bad as I thought it would be. Left-hand shifting got pretty easy (although Ben hit the door once as he instinctively reached with his right hand), and even basic road rules were easy to pick up on. In fact, the hardest thing about driving in the left lane was using the turn signals. I don't know why this isn't standardized but the windshield wipers and turn signal levers are switched. You can only imagine how many times those wiper blades went off as we tried to let the other drivers know we were changing lanes. It's a good thing South Africans are very friendly on the road; we'd have been chewed out by Americans with some of small mistakes we made.

Along the way we stopped for lunch in small town by the mountains, stopped for gas, stopped for bathroom breaks--all these delays resulted in us arriving exactly at 5PM. What we didn't realize was that the bungee closes at exactly that time! On top of that, we were informed that the entire day was booked and they were not taking any more customers. This did not work for us as we had driven halfway across SA just to try it. After giving the sob story to one of the jumpmasters, we managed to get the three of us on a night jump, but we couldn't get pictures or video of it…the sun had actually set by this time and most of the gorge was getting very dark. To anyone who has not considered doing bungee, I highly highly highly recommend it. I can't describe all that was going through my head when I put my feet on the ledge and just jumped out.

We headed back to Cape Town once the other two jumped, but not before stopping over at a South African KFC for dinner. This wasn't my choice, but I can't say I wasn't curious to try it. Once we got home around 1AM, the adrenaline crash knocked me out. Definitely worth it though!

-kav