Strike, Scuba, and Hiking!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written an update but it’s harder than usual to get online. Due to students striking on campus here, the computer labs and library keep being closed to prevent damage to equipment. At this point the library is closed until further notice (ugh!) and I am just lucky right now that the strike is small today and hasn’t managed to close the lab. As they say here “aish!” (it’s like oi vey or ugh or whatever but Zulu-style). The strike is being led by the SRC, student representative council, and is occurring because there are many students who didn’t get on campus residence or financial aid and are living in bad circumstances off campus. I understand that this is a serious issue and I am lucky to have a room here and my finances are good. However, the goal of the strike, to get heard, is to disrupt all lectures and get normal classes and whatnot to cease for the time being. At first they were just marching around campus, singing, chanting, and dancing. Being in DC, I’m kind of used to this. What I’m not used to is rumors of students going into classrooms and harassing other students to join them and getting lectures cancelled. There is also talk that they have broken windows and vandalized cars but I’m not sure how much of that is true. Some of my classes were cancelled on Thursday and Friday but some met and I didn’t have any problems with striking students. However, Monday I was taking a test and two strikers came in the back and were saying that we couldn’t be writing a test while students were on strike. The lecturer (it’s an ethics/philosophy class) tried to reason with them and say that we couldn’t be forced to join the strike and that they couldn’t prevent us from pursuing our education…but the reasoning didn’t work and they turned the lights out on our test. Literally shut them off three separate times so the lecturer was forced to cancel the test and it’ll be rescheduled. I was realllly not pleased since I spent the whole day Sunday studying for it and felt like I was doing really well on it. On the way to my next class, everyone was walking in the direction away from campus and some people were running. I knew this couldn’t be good. I got to the top of the stairs that lead up from the residences to campus (it’s all on a hill) and people were standing waiting and said that the riot police were on scene and it was getting bad. I started to go the back way, around the strike, to class when I heard shots fired. Thankfully there were only rubber bullets and no one was seriously hurt, but I guess that sting pretty badly. After 10 minutes or so, things cleared out and all looked good so I did got to class, with 8 other students who showed up. There were no other problems yesterday, and today things are much much quieter. There are extra security guards around the classrooms and there appear to be no riot police. The only striking I’ve seen was 15 or so students and they were just sitting or chanting. I hope this is the end of the chaos but I also hope something is done to help them. I’m just not sure that this is the way to do it. It’s strange to be here in this privileged position while other students are struggling. One girl told me that when I go back to my country, I should tell them that apartheid is still happening in South Africa. I’m writing this to share my experiences and not to make anyone worry about me. At no time was I in real danger. I wasn’t near the crowds and I will continue to avoid them. I wasn’t even on the same level of campus as the shots fired. I think things are clearing up and I will stay safe.
In other news, I should probably mention the actual dives I did since I wrote about the class. Sodwana is an amazing place! The five dives I went on were all amazing. I arrived Friday night, drove up with two girls from the class, and couldn’t find some of my gear initially. Things were a bit hectic getting all the boatloads ready and all the gear kitted up (check out my diver lingo) and the boats loaded, the camp set up on the beach, and the boats launched, but once you were in the water it was all amazing. I went on three dives on Saturday and we started bright and early in the morning, which is good because we hit a lot of snags along the way. I was sharing gear with another girl so as soon as I came off the boat I had to give her my stuff, including my wetsuit, which is not exactly cake to take on and off, but it all worked out. I didn’t know what to expect for th reef in Sodwana but it was bigger and more awesome than I could have anticipated. On the first dive I saw a huge manta ray sleeping at the bottom and two really big and moray eels! The fish were awesome and so colorful. We were down for about 25 minutes and it was so cool. The second dive was a little longer and I saw a big sea turtle sleeping under an overhang! And more cool fish! The third dive happened after one of the boat motors broke, but we got to snorkel in the meantime and saw some cool stuff close to shore that way. On the third dive I saw a scorpion fish and a puffer (not puffed up). At the end of the day, since your not putting the boat in any more, you get to drive it fast at the beach and beach it up on the sand, this was also really fun (don’t worry, we wear lifejackets and hold on to all these ropes). We did however have to push that boat up to the truck, and then the truck through the beach a good ways. So diving is really awesome and really tiring. It rained at the campsite that night but luckily I stayed pretty dry and so did the inside of our tent. The next day I got to do two more dives, both awesome as well. My cylinder was smaller that day and I breath a lot I guess underwater, so I kept getting to the level of air which you come up at first. On the fourth dive we saw two white-tipped reef sharks! So cool! On the fifth dive we had to do our skills. This means that you kneel in the sand at the bottom of the ocean ( a cool feeling!) and have to show that you can take your mask all the way off, put it back on, and clear it. This was challenging even in the pool but we all managed to do it, a great feeling. We also had to remove our mouthpiece underwater (that thing that you breath through) and find it and put it back in. And we had to breathe through our partners spare mouthpiece (octo-breathing). We all passed and then the rest of the dive was the best for me of them all. We saw a little sea turtle swimming around on one of the earlier dives that I forgot to mention but this time we saw a big one eating! And it saw us, and kept eating, and we got to watch it for a long time. Either I was braver and got closer to the fish, or they got closer to me, these little ones were all around me and near my face. They were awesome colors. We also saw a huge school of fish from the bottom to the surface on one of the other dives and we got really close to it, almost in it, that I forgot to mention as well. So much!
Now I am fully certified beginner scuba diver!
One other thing I should write about is my hike on Saturday. It was epic! Myself and 5 other girls headed to the Krantzkloof Nature Reserve for the day. It’s part of the Valley of 1000 Hills, a really beautiful and mountainous/hilly area about 30 minutes from Durban. We planned to be there the whole day but I don’t think anyone imagined the actual hike we went on. We started off and immediately had beautiful views of the cliff side across from the one we were on, and a waterfall running down it. We continued and entered a forest like area and then headed down to this rocky river bed. Our trail crossed the river at one point so we took our shoes off and waded through, then sat down for our picnic lunch and let our feet dry. Little did we know that the trail crossed the river probably about 5 more times…I think that it was higher than usual because of the rain and some areas that were usually just rock actually had some fast moving water over them. There was on really hard spot to cross. Mio and Myrthe made it halfway across but the rest of us were too short/ too nervous to straddle the rocks they used, so we headed back upstream to a more rocky area. I made it half way across when Sarah was still coming and dropped her shoes in the river! Meg called to Myrthe to lean out and grab them…but they never got that far. They got stuck in the rocks and small rapids somewhere, so Meg and I had to scramble like Gollum over the rocks to find them. I ended up getting both and was just lucky to reach under this huge boulder where the second one was and had to yank it out. After that we cursed the river every time we came back around to it. Eventually the landscape turned into more of a grassland and we started encountering these huge spider webs all along the trail. They were kite spiders with red and yellow patterns (google it, they’re really crazy looking) and we either had to move them nicely (Annereike is afraid of spiders in general, and these were pretty scary) or duck under and around them. Eventually we headed up and realized that we were climbing one of the red cliffed mountains that we had been in the valley of at the river bed. We went up and up and up and up (meanwhile Myrthe is afraid of heights) and the views were incredible. Finally we came out of top in tall grass and there were zebras! At first they were far off but when we were waiting for the cab to come pick us up we edged closer and closer to them and we got about as close as we thought we should. It was amazing to see truly wild zebras (this isn’t a game reserve) that close up. They are awesome. I can’t wait to put all the pictures up from the past month and a half (there are tonsss) but I will have to wait until the library reopens. Hopefully that is very soon! I’ve been here for about two months now!