The View is Awesome!

I need to take some good pictures to share with you guys just how beautiful it is here. The city of Stellenbosch is surrounded on 3 sides with beautiful mountains and some of the bluest skies (apparently ranking 3rd in all the skies in the world as read in a travel guide). Every morning I walk out the door of my flat I am faced with this rocky mountain staring me in the face. I often just stop and stare at how amazing this landscape is and it never gets old. They look as if you could reach out and touch them, but the closest one is about 2 miles from my flat. Sometimes I look at them and think “They aren’t that big and I could easily make it to the top,” but then sometimes the clouds hide the top making me think they are bigger than I think. This is often a topic of debate among our group.

This week I started training for a half marathon in Cape town later in the semester with Sarah. Right now it is just us, but it seems like there might be some interest among others and possibly some recruits. Thankfully I ran a little bit at home over break, so I wasn’t in terrible shape. Running in 10 degree weather home makes running here in the 80’s feel like a piece of cake. On Monday we used this run to explore a little bit of campus and headed for the sports complex. There we were amazed by the huge spread of fields that are nearly the size of the entire rest of campus. Just beyond the rugby stadium we noticed there was some stairs heading up the side of a hill headed towards one of the mountains. We headed up this path and found that there are a bunch of trails that go through the foothills of these mountains and possibly some to the top. Once we reached the hills, the terrain completely changed. We could see below us the extremely green city of Stellenbosch, but the hills were savannah terrain that is more dusty and bushy. As I looked around me, things felt more like “The Lion King” with each step. I think I may have seen the elephant graveyard, but didn’t forget Mufasa’s warning like some headstrong lions in the past. What I could see from these hills was an amazing view of campus, town, the other mountains, and the farmland that creep up the mountains. Lions and elephants were the only things missing, but it’s still truly breathtaking and might just be the answer to the mystery of why everyone is so fit. As I jogged around these hills, I forgot about the running that I was doing and was completely caught up in the wonders of nature surrounding me. I probably would have just kept going forever if Sarah wasn’t there to remind me of the distances and workouts.

One of the greatest reasons I fell in love with Africa was because of all the wonderful things that the nature here had to offer and these runs have helped me to connect with it. I am extremely happy that they have been able to do this because I would feel pretty stupid not taking advantage of this heavenly setting that is surrounding me every day. This weekend I will get to experience it a little bit more when our program goes on a trip in the Cederberg Mountains. We will get a chance to do some hiking and other outdoorsy activities. I’m most excited to see the stars at night from a place that has a little bit less light pollution than what I’m used to back in the northeast.