Sightseeing Day

Today we headed out for a day of sightseeing with a 7:00am breakfast (boys did dishes!) to get an early start.  The day was gorgeous with hardly a cloud in the sky with a little bit of a breeze. We first went to Boulders Beach where the Penguins were.  There was a nice catwalk down to the beach area that wound around and around through penguin nesting territory.  It ended up with a nice overlook of the beach area where there were a lot of penguins.  Apparently, there are over 2200 breeding pairs of African penguins!  They were very cute and many of them had eggs they were sitting on.  Some were burrowed into the dunes and others were just nesting on top.  We then had devotions on the beach by Camryn and played in the Indian Ocean for a few minutes.

We were then off to the next location.  We are visiting Cape Point National Park.  It is not the southern-most point of Africa - we would need to travel another 1000 miles to get to that area. It was still very impressive though! (See pictures) We walked up 1100 steps to get to the lighthouse and many of us also went out even further to the lighthouse keepers house.  It was cool to see the two oceans meet there and to see white water and kelp stuck between them.  It actually made a wavy white line extending out several hundred yards!

We then had pizza, sandwiches and salads for lunch, and then headed out down a different trail to another overlook.  It was beautiful.  There was an amazing pure white sand beach below us with a lot of seabirds flying around.  The nice thing was that Pastor Ohm had the drivers pick us up at the bottom of the hill, so we didn’t have to walk back up again.  That was nice.  We even saw a few ostriches as we drove away along with some springbok antelope.  We were warned about baboons, but didn’t see any.

On the way back we stopped at a beach that was perfect for surfing.  It was a long white sand beach where the waves came in forming very long continuous breakers.  It was common to see 7 or 8 people catch the same wave and not be close to each other.  This beach is also famous because it is where they filmed the movie JAWS. Some did a short yoga routine, while others got some ice cream (gelato), and did some looking for sea glass and shells before heading home.

Once home, we had a nice meal by Bruce, the chef that cooked for us before.  It was, once again, a culinary delight!  We have really been spoiled with the food here.  Afterwards, we had worship time and thanked our guests and translators who have been helping us and gave them some gifts.

Guess what else also happened tonight?  It rained again!  Thank you for all of your prayers! We were dancing in the rain and enjoying the lightning and thunderstorm show. I think Mikey got one of them on film!  It also rained for a good bit through the night, so that was really good to see. The lack of rain may not seem like much, but many jobs the poor people have here depend on water. Jobs like gardening, pool cleaning, landscaping, car washes, laundry services, etc. have gone unfilled due to lack of water.

We then packed up our bags and tried to get everything back in there for our departure tomorrow. For some, this is much easier than others as we are leaving many of our clothes behind that we worked in. Any of the clothes we leave will be washed by our ministry partners here and distributed to the people in the squatter camps.

Leaving is bittersweet because we are looking forward to seeing everyone again, but we are sad to be leaving such a beautiful place and such beautiful people. See you tomorrow! We have grown to love your kids, but you can have them back now!

Mr. Worthington