Advertisement
Published: July 20th 2008
Half way up
Cape Town half way up the mountain. It looks nice now, but it got windy and cloudy quickly.Prior to coming to Cape Town, I took summer classes at Albion, and during our summer classes, my friends and I went to Hardee’s to eat their Monster Thickburger. I had been doing a research paper on the fast food industry, and according to a nutritional chart I found, the Monster Thickburger is the fattest of all fast food burgers. I joked with my roommate about wanting to eat it, and before I knew it we created a Facebook event and about 10 people made a pilgrimage to Hardee’s to eat this greasy, Tour de fat of Americana.
With that being said, I was quick to note that the McDonald’s posters down here advertised the Mega Mac, or the Double Big Mac. Four all beef patties, plus the lettuce, special sauce, cheese and pickles on a sesame seed bun. Unlike America, McDonald’s are not found at every corner of every street. Ironically, they’re kind of like air; you know it’s there, and there’s plenty of it, but you can’t see it. The McDonald’s here are hidden in malls or wedged between bigger buildings that shield the Golden Arches. McDonald’s is still popular here, they are the official restaurant sponsor of
South Africa Parliament
Look kids, there's Parliament! the 2010 World Cup, but South Africans do not eat at McDonalds as regularly as Americans. Many people around the world argue this is a good thing and that South Africans are not getting fat like Americans. I’ve always supported the American fast food industry. We created it, it’s uniquely American, and rarely do I feel prouder to be an American than when I’m shoving a quad beef patty burger into my jaws.
Since I had already taken summer classes at Albion, my entire semester abroad counted as one unit, and any classes I took simply added to my credit total and bumped me up in the housing lottery and class registration. I also signed up to take my classes ‘credit/no credit’ which, as the name implies, means that if I passed the class by any number, I received ‘credit’ and if I failed the class, no matter how spectacularly, I received ‘no credit.’ This is the academia equivalent of making the cut in a golf tournament. You shoot above the cut line, you’re playing the weekend; you shoot below it, and you’re boarding your private jet for the tournament in Hilton Head next weekend. With my objective being
to solely make the cut, I was able to take a couple courses that I found interesting and could take them without having to worry about walking up the 72nd hole on Sunday tied for the lead. I chose to take ‘Gender and History,’ which examined the social movements of races and specifically genders in Africa, Europe and North America, and I also took History of the Southern World, a course discussing history in Southern Africa, Australia, India and…Mexico. Yes, Mexico is apparently part of the southern world. While geographically it is south of the United States, I think the equator has the final say in which countries are and aren’t in the southern half of the world, and Mexico does not pass the equator. Even though I’d learned about Mexico in previous history classes in the States, Southern Africa, Australia and India were countries whose histories go largely ignored in American school history classes.
My first adventure also took place in my first couple weeks in Cape Town when I attempted to hike Devil’s Peak, the 3,000 foot tall lunch mother watching over all of Cape Town. The hike was organized by a company called 2 Way Travel, which focuses on organizing travel itineraries for international students at the University of Cape Town. Owned by the happy-go-lucky Mike Gathercole, Mike was our hike leader with the assistance of another student who had hiked Devil’s Peak and lived to lead unsuspecting foreigners to the top.
“The hike is a bit hectic, so make sure you stretch out beforehand and bring plenty of water,” Mike said before the hike.
A bit hectic? I didn’t know what he meant by a bit hectic, but I nodded in agreement and stretched beforehand. I’d hiked before, in the Adirondack foothills in upstate New York, the Sleeping Bear Dunes along Lake Michigan, Lombard Street in San Francisco and in Red Rock Park outside of Las Vegas. I knew what I was doing, I was fairly fit after spending the majority of the year exercising and working out regularly at school for such an occasion. In fact, Mike, why don’t you take the day off? Hand me my bullwhip, leather jacket and fedora, and I’ll take it from here. The group is in safe hands with Indiana Kyle. Pssh, hectic.
Devil’s Peak is easily accessible along the back road on UCT’s upper campus, and the first leg of the hike is an exhibition hike up to the Rhodes Memorial. Everyone was talkative and friendly when we started climbing; students from California, North Carolina and Massachusetts were in the group as well as a handful of South African students, so it was nice getting to know a handful of people from places not named Michigan. Once we reached the Rhodes Memorial, we were all out of breath and the talking was replaced by panting and gasping. To our water-gulping, sweat pouring, air-gasping surprise, this was the pre-game stretches, the bullpen warm-up, and the shoot around of the hike. We continued upwards from the Rhodes Memorial and eventually reached a trail of switchback paths that zigzagged across the lower base of the mountain. We had to pull ourselves up rocks and try to avoid the ill-fated slip on the wet stones that would send us all the way back to the bottom in a topographical game of Chutes n Ladders. It was while pulling myself up these rocks that two bulletins posted in my head: I was no Indiana Jones, I was Suburban Sam, and hike was the wrong verb for our activity—climb, assault, trek, scale, and Sylvester Stallone-impersonating were all better verb choices.
We made it about 1,000 feet up, the first period of our game, and stopped to eat, drink and recall if our travel insurance policies covered falling or slipping on wet rocks. Even from the first third of the mountain, we could see the entire city bowl of Cape Town and Robben Island off in the sea. Green Point Stadium was visible as were the Hotentot Mountains off on the northern horizon. We took our pictures but we didn’t come on this “hike” for pictures, we came to reach the summit, where less than 10% of all Cape Town residents have made it, so we continued upwards.
The middle third was when the hike truly turned into a climb. We pulled up on rock ledges and inched ourselves along the edge of the mountain. There is one vertigo-raising step where you had to step over a gap in the ledge and pull yourself up, with nothing but 1,500 feet of gravity and air below you. I don’t know if past climbers named this particular ledge but I’m going to refer to it as the Balls-Shrinker because it takes a strong pair to step over that ledge and pull yourself up without accidentally participating in an unplanned sky dive.
We got the better part of two-thirds of the way up, well into the final period of play, when the wind picked up and gray, cranky storm clouds surrounded us. Mike and the student guide told us that the final part of the ascent involved a narrow path with no rocks to hang on to for balance, and officially called a weather delay. My body was freezing from the wind and cold remnants of sweat, arms scraped, legs shaking, heart drumming and lungs were aching, only to be turned around in the final period. I respected Mike’s safety precaution and even if we had pressed on, the view from the top would have been hidden by all the clouds, but it was a very empty feeling knowing we had come all that way only to turn back without reaching our goal. It was a humbling experience and lesson in humility. We were the second place team, the silver medalists and the runner’s-up. I thought of the New England Patriots, who worked so hard all season to put together a perfect record and reach the Super Bowl, only to fall short in the final minutes. The effort needed to climb a mountain, whether a literal or metaphoric one is grueling and you squeeze every ounce of endurance from your muscles on the way up. At the very least, you want to reach the top, to show that those extra reps in the gym or extra incline on the treadmill paid off. No one wants to go home and brag to their friends, “See this bruise! I got it when I climbed 2/3 of the way up the mountain!” Mike, being the happy-go-lucky man and smart tourism businessman, reassured us that we’d try again on another day, and this encouraged me. Although in the following days when I’d look up at Devil’s Peak and the ledge where we got blown off, I realized how high we’d climbed and what the mountain would be like on our next attempt to reach the top. Again I thought about losing championship teams who saw the Lombardi Trophy, Stanley Cup, etc, and knew how much work went into climbing their mountain, only to not reach the summit.
The failed summit was disappointment number one of my first two weeks. Disappointment number two was that ‘The Dark Knight,’ a movie I had been looking forward to seeing, opened in America a week before it was scheduled to open in South Africa, and I kept hearing rave reviews about it from friends back home, and it fueled my impatience. Eventually it would come and I would see it with a group of friends the Saturday it opened, and it exceeded the hype, leaping into my list of favorite movies. It was an instance that drove home a recurring theme during my semester; that studying abroad requires patience, and without patience, you’re nothing more than a lone man lost on a mountain, with no clue on how to reach the top.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.105s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0565s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Julie Doppke
non-member comment
food
Love to see your mind is concentrating on the important issues like good ol' Americanized FAST FOOD! Glad things are going well...hope you can climb to the top another day! ?Auntie Julie