The garden route was soooo pretty! Me and two of my roommates, Kristina and Ben, rented a car and spent from monday to friday driving around. Somehow I got voted to drive (I really didn't mind though) which meant that we needed an automatic car. I know that a couple very patient daring people have tried to teach me to drive stick with some success but I just didn't think that worrying about that in combination with driving on the left side of the road would be a good idea. We couldn't call the car rental place until Monday, which is when we wanted to leave, so I just asked for the smallest cheapest automatic they had and what do we end up with...a Mercedes. Yikes. Just in case I wasn't nervous enough, I had to be driving a billion dollar car. But it actually wasn't that difficult to drive on the left side, mostly because the garden route is one long highway and you can't really get lost. The garden route is pretty much just s series of little towns along the coast with a beautiful drive. It's amazing how fast the scenery changes. One minute we were in huge green mountains and valleys, the next your in dry flat land with gorgeous red clay sand and then all of a sudden there's an endless coastline.

We stayed in Mossel Bay on the first night, just had dinner and walked around. The waves were huge there but people we surfing anyway and it was really impressive. We climbed around some of the hills along the coast and had a perfect view of the really rocky coastline with all the waves smashing into these caves that had been carved out. We just relaxed at the backpacker place that night. Every backpacker place we stayed was so homey. The people are all really friendly and one lady even saved me a huge piece of chocolate cake and left it on my bed for me after she saw me eyeing it. They're kind of small and you gotta sleep on a bunkbed, inevitably with a snorer 2 feet away, but they're so cozy that it doesn't bother you. And they had hammocks!

Anyways, the backpacker place owner in Mossel Bay told us about this huge festival going on a little farther down so we decided to check it out. It turns out it was an Afrikaans festival and nothing was in English! Fortunately everyone spoke English, but the music was in Afrikaans and, even though the festival was huge, it was kind of cheesy (think frontier days only with 10 times as many people) so we didn't stick around that long. We kept going and got to a place called Wilderness (honestly, if that doesn't sound promising, I don't know what does) and decided to stay there for the night. We were right on the beach with really dense forested mountains behind us. Don't worry, Ben has a camera and I will be stealing all of the pictures very soon. We went to dinner and a very delicious Italian restaurant only to see our other roommates Liv and Jan and their friend walking in! We had been trying to get a hold of them because we knew they were on the garden route too, but hadn't managed to get in touch and they just happened to come to the same restaurant. We we had a massive three course three hour dinner and then decided to go hang out on the beach and ended up staying out there almost all night singing and running around and jumping in the waves. They water was so much warmer than cape town, so it was really the first time that I actually got to go in the ocean for more than four seconds without freezing.

The next morning we hauled ourselves out of bed and kept going all the way to Jeffery's Bay, which is actually in the Eastern Cape, the next province over. It's a huge surfer town where they have a lot of surf competitions so they had lots of stores to browse around and a beautiful beach to lay on and look for shells. We took a walk on the beach at night and saw two enormous washed up jelly fish, one that Kristina almost stepped on.

We spent the next morning on the beach and then started to drive back in the other direction because the world's tallest bungy jump in right on the garden route and kristina really wanted to do it. It's 216 meters! METERS!! Off of a bridge and into a beautiful valley with a creek at the bottom. I decided I would go up on the bridge with Kristina but not jump, although they weighed me and everything in case I changed my mind (don't worry mom, I didn't). Just to walk to the middle of the bridge, you go in a complete see-through cage type of thing that you can see straight through the bottom of and that was quite scary enough for me. Once you get to the top they play really loud music and try to get you pumped up, but they make you stay a good 3 meters from the edge, so you can't really get a good look over. I was amazed at how calm everyone looked! They just kind of scoot you to the edge (cause your feet are tied together), line up your toes, yell "three, two, one bungy!" and kind of push you over head first. Kristina screamed at first and I almost did too just watching her. I got to see it on video and it is amazing how far you fall...free falling for at least 5 seconds and then you bounce back up and do it a few more times. She said it was really fun! Part of me really wanted to do it just because I was standing at the world's tallest bungy jump, and I actually think I could have gotten myself to jump off if I just didn't look down, but that first moment when you jump and realize it's too late and are flying head first off a bridge is just too scary for me to even think about. So I guess I'm a bit of a wimp.

We spent our last night in Knysna and then got up early to drive home in time for me to pick up my marathon packet! The race started at 6 am this morning! UGH! It was sooo early but thankfully it started literally three blocks from my house, so I just kind of rolled out of bed and jogged over there. There were a lot more people than I was imagining and they were playing really loud music even though it was so early, but it was still completely dark! We actually ran for the first 40 minutes or so in complete darkness but then got to watch the sun come up over the mountains and the city so it was worth it. The slogan is "the world's most beautiful marathon" and I can definitely see why. The race went pretty well, although when I got to the huge hill I started to pay for the previous five days off of running while eating insane amounts of restaurant food (aka french fries, ice cream, you name it). And at the water stations along the way, instead of putting the water in cups, they hand it to you in these little squishy pouches, which makes sense because you can carry one and run with it comfortably if you need water in between the hand-out areas, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to open them! And I didn't want to stop and examine it, but no one else around me seemed to be having any trouble. I couldn't find a litte "tear here" thing of anything, so I ended up just popping them open like a chip bag, getting 90% of the water all over me and then gulping the last little bit, but oh well. The 35 mile ultra marathon starts and ends in the same place, so it was extremely humbling on the final stretch to pass the 20k marker and have it also say 55k. I can't even imagine. But I'm really glad I did it and will spend the rest of the day eating everything I can find and sleeping!