I hate it! ... and yet I cant get enough

You know when somethings bad for you, and you know it, buy you keep doing it anyways? Well I love Coca Cola, but its just so undeniably bad for you I cant drink it without thinking about what its doing to my teeth. For more than a year now I've been drinking water and non soft drinks instead, and then occasionally a glass of coke, but when I do I cant stop.

On a side note, have you heard about the new president of Bolivia? Evo Morale, the latest addition to team Anti-America, along with Castro and Venezuala's Chavez. If South America keep their left wing growing, the US may have some bigger problems pretty soon, and my opinion? It looks like thats the way things are going.

Anyways, the relation to my problem? Bolivia is one of the worlds biggest Coco/coca exportors, anyone know anything about drugs? You do? good, cause the US has been trying to cut down on the ilicit coca farms for decades. During campaigning, Morales promised to end restrictions on growing coca, why? Because its not only bad people buying it to be made into drugs, Coca Cola are among their biggest buyer, even though they have claimed to stop using addictive substances in their soft drinks... bullsh1t!!

Narco News Bulletin in South America reports that hundreds of tons of coca leaf were sold around 1999 to Monsanto, which processed the leaf into syrup which was then sold to companies including Coca Cola. This week, Bolivia authorized the sale of many more tons of coca leaf to the U.S. For the manufacturing of the soft drink, Coca-Cola .
The article says: "... according to U.S. government reports, the processing of the coca leaf includes (they swear) a de-cocainization of the plant" . If this is true then is it possible that there are other chemical components in the coca plant that have properties desirable by a multi national conglomerate wanting to sell its product ?
The article also says. "A spokesperson from Atlanta for Coca Cola denied that the company does not now use, and has never used, cocaine".

Isnt it strange that 'Coca' cola and the coca plant are spelled the same? weird huh?

Kloofing

I’m not entirely sure what the English phrase is, I suppose something like rock jumping, maybe base jumping without a shute, I don’t know. Basically you find a really… really high rock, grab your balls and jump into the pool below, trying your utmost not to scream like a little girl and hurt yourself upon impact.

After another 45 minute hike (I think I’m gonna be a pro pretty soon) we got to the first pool, really serene, lots of sun, an awesome undisturbed natural rock pool with that beautiful brown tannin coloured water (no really it is beautiful) and a few menacing rocks hanging rather high above. To be honest they didn’t look that high, until of course you’re standing on them looking down, not something you get used to. Upon arriving at the area, I rather loudly declared ‘The top one? No problem’ yeah sure, until I got up there, it wasn’t long before I decided it may be wise to try out the smaller one first, so after two smaller jumps (still damn high) I plucked up the courage, stupidity or whatever you want to call it and took the plunge, a few seconds of freefalling is quite a rush, until of course you hit the water, bang! Oh yes, I’m supposed to put my arms in before I hit the water, ha ha.

Caving in Kalk Bay

Since being back in cape town I’ve had this really unexplainable desire to be outdoors, well maybe not entirely unexplainable, I’ve put it down to living in one of this worlds biggest cities for a year and not seeing much of nature, or anything other than towering city blocks and the odd man made park. London was amazing but it doesn’t offer much more than loads of money and one big party.

So after my abseiling adventure a few weeks ago, I decided that caving, cave crawling, whatever you want to call it, was the next exploit I wanted to explore. So once again with Max at my side (no one better to have with you when outdoors… maybe except Steve Irwin) we started climbing Kalk bay mountains to get to these infamous caves. Once at the top it took a bit of scouting around as there aren’t exactly huge billboards pointing you in the right direction, the cave entrances are normally no bigger than the size of a toilet bowl.

10 or 20 minutes later and we’re in the first cave; Max advises that we should crawl down this tunnel that to me didn’t look very inviting. Max went ahead and left me contemplating this, another 5 or 10 minutes later and I followed; scary stuff. The diameter of the tunnel is just big enough to fit my waist through, so picture me getting to a point where its so tight that my arms cant really move and I’m forced to push myself with my legs… hmmm fun. Anyways the point is that I did it, it was one of the scariest and most trying times of my life but I figured if max can do it so can I.

After that rather testing experience, we ventured towards another far friendlier cave where there was still much crawling but far less than the first cave. And this time the crawling resulted in huge bat caves, much to my disappointment though I couldn’t find the batmobile, maybe the cave was still being rebuilt after the Wayne mansion burned down. We did however see bats, standing dead still, paying no attention to the dripping water all over the cave, I pointed my flashlight upwards and waited for the bats to ‘flit’ from one wall to the other. It was an awesome experience and one that I would like to do again sometime, maybe in winter when half the caves are filled with water, that could be interesting.

Photos to follow.

The frequency of blog posting

Blogs have been around for some time now and the blogging community is definitely growing. Some use blogs as daily journals for the rest of the world to read, others use it as some sort of advertising log with far too many websites offering whatever product it is they’re marketing, then there are the travellers.

When I was in London I posted on almost a daily basis, not that it was really worth reading, but now since being back in cape town I barely post twice a month.

Why?

Well I’ve been thinking about it, and there are a few reasons why I believe this is so. I started thinking: is life back home less interesting? Are there fewer activities and is life less eventful away from travelling? Or is it because being home is not ‘new’ its not different, you’re used to it so it becomes less blog worthy.

Another reason? Internet connections, as advanced as cape town may be when compared to the rest of Africa, we are still unfortunately considered a 3^rd world country, which among other things means that anything more than a standard 56k dial up line is a little overpriced. So when trying to post a photo, or waiting for the page to load takes more than 2 seconds you become hesitant to log on.

In conclusion, I can say with much confidence that there is far more to do in Cape Town that in London, only major differences are that we have fewer pubs, Big Ben is not a clock, and our climate rocks! I write for others to read (kind of obvious I guess) and being back home means that my 100’s of fans (whatever) are no longer a million miles away.

So please keep reading, although the posting will be less frequent I won’t stop writing crap.