_Alright, this is the last of the travel logs. It’s also the one about shark cage diving. I mean, after this I’m just going back to Mossel Bay to party with the rose girls and then back to school, so nothing else to report really. But this one is exciting.

_The trip from Cape Town started pretty typically: The BazBus driver, after picking up the last backpacker, found the one-way street blocked by an illegally parked car. So he laid on the horn for about two minutes straight and woke up the entire neighborhood. Then some lady started pounding on the driver’s window and wanted him to step out and fight. Words were exchanged, the only ones I caught were the driver telling the lady “You do not know my father’s beliefs.” It was hilarious. After we backed out of the street the driver told us that the lady was probably on drugs and that when he got back to Cape Town he’d call his friend in the police and have her arrested.

_So we drove out of Cape Town and towards Hermanus. The BazBus dropped me off at some waystation where I was picked up by the backpacker’s staff. I spent my Easter Sunday walking around Hermanus (cute town) and braaing with the hippie/surfer backpacker staff. There is nothing more entertaining than Afrikaans hippies/surfers. Let me tell you. The only trouble was figuring out how I was going to somehow wake up early enough for the shark cage dive until I found out that all the other people sleeping in my dorm were going on the same trip. So it wasn’t a problem.

_The shark cage team picked me up sometime around 6:45 this morning and took us to Gansbaai (pronounced, because this is South Africa, as “Heinz-Buy”) where the docks are. Along the way I realize that I was ten times more afraid of the driver’s driving than I was of any sharks. At the office they gave us breakfast and explained all the safety precautions and then took us out to the boat. The boat being was a thirty foot deal with a roof/deck over the back where you can watch the sharks from above.

_Now here’s how it works. The boat goes out towards these islands that are home to massive fur seal colonies, which the sharks love to eat. In search of food, the sharks (which are all over seven feet long and with weight in the tonnage) hang around the islands and follow their noses to anything tasty. So the boat anchors and then starts throwing chum (fish oil and blood, basically) into the water. There’s also a bait, which is a clump of fish heads attached to a twenty foot long rope. As soon as the sharks start to check out the bait, they lower the cage.

_The cage is about eight feet by ten feet and about four feet wide. There’s just enough room for five people to stand shoulder to shoulder with about and inch and a half between their knuckles and the outter bars of the cage. And there aren’t many bars, by the way. The divers enter the cage from the top, bob with their heads above the water, and then when the crewmember with the bait says so, they duck down and watch the sharks go by.

_But the cage is perfectly safe because the sharks don’t really trust it enough to try and eat it. But the crew does drag the bait close to the cage to give the divers a better view, so the sharks do bump into the cages from time to time.

_So once the sharks started to bite (and sometimes they don’t bite at all and the trip gets scrubbed, so we were lucky), they suited us up in wetsuits (some of which looked like they were the bait for the last dive) and sent the first rotation in. I was in the third rotation. Shark cage diving involves a lot of patience (and a lot of getting used to the incredibly cold water), but the payoff is worth it. The crewmember with the bait doesn’t tell you where the shark is coming from, he only tells you to keep your eyes on the baitline and then to get ready and then when to get down, so you get the full excitement of seeing a shark coming at you at full speed with no idea where it came from. It’s actually more fun when the visability is low.

_So as the second rotation climbed out, I grabbed some wetboots and a hood and strapped the goggles on. I sank into the freezing cold water and wasn’t really concerned about shark teeth at that moment. The German guy in the cage said it best:
- ME: Water’s cold
- HIM: You think it’s cold?
- ME: Yeah.
- HIM: Oh. Cause I think it’s fucking freezing!
So we’re bobbing there, watching in the direction of the baitline, trying not to die of hypothermia, which is a much greater risk than the sharks. Finally after about ten minutes the crewmember says “Down!” and we sink in. The visability wasn’t that good, but the shark came close enough, along the side of the cage, taking a playful half-bite at the bait. Apparently sharks bite things to test whether they want to eat it or not, which is what they were doing with the bait. So once we got to see a good shark go buy, the popped open the top of the cage and started to take us out. But it takes a couple minutes to get everybody in and out, so while I was waiting to get out another shark went by, this one (maybe the same one, it’s hard to tell), took a bit of a bigger bite at the bait and I got to see all those friendly rows of teeth.

_So I got out and started to warm up in the sun and watched the other divers go in. All in all we saw a total of five different sharks (apparently), one of which breached the water without warning and actually ate the bait. Luckily the crew had a spare. Almost no one got sea sick (you’re on a tiny little boat for four hours bobbing up and down), except for the two Indian guys who never even made it into wetsuits. Once everyone was freezing cold they took us back in, gave us lunch and beer in the office and played a DVD they’d compiled of all the highlights, including the shark eating the bait.

_And then, to top off my African wildlife experience, I saw a baboon! It was roadkill! We had to slow down to a crawl to keep from running it over! Welcome to Africa!

- Kid