I spent most of my holidays in Cape Town, because after the BA weekend, I went down again to stay with my cousins, who are 13 and 8 years old.

We had a really awesome time there, and did tons of fun stuff, like tobogganing, going to wine farms, and of course, going to the seaside. I think we went to pretty much every beach Cape Town has to offer! Camps Bay has the most gorgeous scenery I’ve ever seen, including the Twelve Apostles (which I thought were the Twelve Possums, which didn’t quite make sense until I had it explained to me by relatives who were busy hosing themselves), but the water was absolutely freezing!

Muizenberg beach was a lot warmer, but the problem was that it’s right next to the Great Whites’ breeding ground! And since I’m absolutely petrified of sharks of any kind, you can guess that I wasn’t exactly about to cannon-ball into waves containing a rather unpleasant death. But it turns out they’ve got a pretty cool way of keeping swimmers from having various limbs torn off. People sit on the mountains, and keep an eye out for sharks. As soon as a shark enters the bay, they set off a siren, and everyone gets out, until they lower the “danger” flag. Apparently, since they’ve set up this system, there hasn’t been a single shark attack! (Touch wood!) Of course, it was only after we were leaving that I saw that the “Somebody’s on duty, but the visibility’s poor, so good luck with that!” flag was up!

On another beach by Table View, I found a seal skull, which (although kinda smelly) was in perfect shape. It’s interesting to note that the foramen magnum (which is just the scientific word for a big hole in the skull, into which the beginning of the spine fits) is at the back of the skull, instead of underneath it, like a human’s. This indicates that the animal would travel on “all fours”, instead of two legs, like us. This is just another indicator of how, during Evolution, humans have changed dramatically, and that this particular change enabled us to walk upright.
I think that the rest of the seal got eaten by a shark, since the skull was snapped off pretty cleanly, but that might be a bit melodramatic. Anyhow, I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor thing died of cold, since the water there seems to prove that there actually is a temperature below Absolute Zero!

Anyway, I had a really fantastic time in Cape Town, and we spent Christmas there as well, which was also great! But now I’m back in Joburg, and we’ve just gone back to school, but more about that next week…