The Last 5 Days

It has been a while since we updated the blog so I am going to take a minute to give a quick run-down of the last few days.

First, Friday night was an amazing night. After some hard days in the clinics where things seemed pretty dismal, we went to a Concert outside of Johannesburg where the Soweto Gospel Choir performed. These guys have won two Grammy's and they are incredible. We were on the third row and it was truly amazing. It was a small crowd in a church and everyone got so into the music. Very much a community feel of joy and hope and excitement. The most unbelievable contrast ever to the hopeless, sad clinics of the previous two days, and the difference was the Gospel. Truly the joy these people had in singing about Jesus in 5 different languages was unbelievable and incredibly unifying. It was something you could feel in the room as people increasingly stood up, moved to the sides and started dancing to the music. Really neat experience.

Saturday was a pretty uneventful day. Kinda like a Saturday in America. We did spend a lot of time learning to drive a manual transmission truck which was fun and certainly worthwhile.

Sunday we went to Goenkloof (sp?) nature reserve. It is in Pretoria and it has Jeep trails and all kinds of African animals: giraffe, impala, water buffalo, ostrich, zebra. It was neat. That was pretty much Sunday.

Monday we officially decided that we were headed to Cape Town for our next PEPFAR work so we spent the day preparing for the trip. Mall, maps, looking up lodging, and other stuff like that. Our hosts helped us out greatly with that process.

And Tuesday morning we were off on the road to Cape Town (the left side of the road). It is a long trek down there, 14oo km (you can look up how many miles that is but this trip has convinced us of the value of the metric system). On Tuesday we went as far as Colesberg where we stayed at a really neat Dutch-style Bed and Breakfast called Kuilfontein. It was really neat except for the driveway where we got a flat tire when we hit a rock on the mile-long dirt road into the B&B. Bummer, but we got it changed and got a new tire in Coles=berg this morning and it didn't set us back.

Today was a great day on the road. We went from Colesberg to Graaf-Reinet, a small French/Dutch town that was beautiful. Then we moved on to Port Elizabeth on the East Coast. From there we drove around the coast to Wilderness which is a small tourist destination between the towns of Knysna and George. It was an unbelievable drive. Beautiful landscape and scenery. We passed the highest bungy jumping platform in the world and although it was tempting we decided not to try it. Although we did have to pause on the bridge the bunjy jumping was staged from over a beautiful river gorge that emptied into the Indian Ocean. Really amazing. We took pictures throughout the drive, but they really don't do the scenery justice.

Tomorrow we are finishing the drive to Cape Town where we will be for the next week and hoping to get back involved with some more PEPFAR work.

Stay tuned for more pictures.....