Durban

Wow!  What a trip.  I think I can place this past week as the top trip I have ever taken.  I saw some amazing things and had so much fun.  I am serious when I say that EVERYONE should go to Tofo.  It is a bit hard to get there, but it is amazing and cheap to stay there.

The trip started last Thursday.  After our last day of work for GRS (sad?) Will and I hopped on a bus to Durban.  I slept most of the drive.  We arrived around 7:00 the next morning and Jim picked us up from the bus station.  Jim had left earlier in the week to do some diving along the wild coast - sardine run and stuff.  The bad news was that the City Lads were leaving that morning.  We went to Durban to spend some time with the girls and hopefully get to see them play in the national tournament.  The lost their games in the group stage sadly and the management didn't want to stay to watch the rest of the tournament play out so they were leaving Friday morning.  We went to their hotel to see them off and got to spend a little bit saying hi, but then it was just the 3 remaining  no-longer-interns.

Our weekend in Durban was great.  We got to relax by the beach, catch a Red Bull extreme water sport show, watch a beach volleyball tournament, try local bunny chow, etc.  The Durban boardwalk is amazingly nice.  It's actually quite strange how nice the boardwalk is because as soon as you cross past Marine Drive and go into the city, the "nice" factor falls away quite quickly.  Like PE, the city is pretty much just fast food restaurants and cheap clothing chains.  Weird.  We did also spend a decent amount of time on Friday at the Mozambique consulate.

Jet Ski doing a back-flip off a wave

Jim had found an address for the consulate online that put it in one of the main buildings in the city center.  We went there and did not find it.  We asked around and no one knew.  We must have traveled 3 different floors asking random people before someone could FINALLY point us towards the security center for the building.  From the guy working there we found out that the office had moved across the city.  He was able to get us an address, but not really any directions.  After asking some randoms for directions to our new address we set off.  The thing about Durban though, is that every street has multiple names.  We were looking for Stamford, but like all streets, it was also named after some African person.  The main street is West, and online addresses and maps will say West, but it is labeled on the street signs as Dr So-and-So.  Similarly, Stamford was labeled as Moses-Somebody, and, at one point, First street.  This, needless to say, was quite confusing and we drove around a while before finding out actual location.  Once there though, it didn't take too long to get a nice new visa in my passport.