Taylor enjoying some of her favorite places before leaving

Our last few weeks of the semester in Cape Town have been filled with new adventures and experiences.  One of my biggest bucket list items for this semester has been to hike Table Mountain, and I finally accomplished it this past weekend!  Laura G., Alex, Sarah and I all took the Skeleton Gorge route which starts at Kirstenbosch Gardens and it was so beautiful.  The route was really challenging; it started with a bunch of natural stairs in the forest and continued into a series of ladders and larger boulders to climb.  Even though it was difficult, reaching the top of the tree canopy and seeing the view of Cape Town was one of my favorite moments of the trip so far.  It had rained the night before and was a bit overcast so there were not many people hiking, but that made it even better because it was so peaceful hearing only the birds and rain dripping on the rocks.  I decided to hike down as well, which was actually harder than the way up!  The Platteklip Gorge trail has a lot more large boulders than Skeleton Gorge, which made it very challenging to climb down.  By the end of the day I was definitely sore but I am so glad that I fit this great experience into one of my last weeks!

The rest of the weekend I was pretty tired and sore from hiking, but I still ended up spending it in some of my favorite places in Cape Town! On Saturday, Karen and I spent the day relaxing in Kirstenbosch Gardens.  We wanted to explore some of the trails and gardens we still hadn’t gotten a chance to see, and it was a perfect day outside.  Kirstenbosch is definitely one of my favorite places in Cape Town, and one that I will miss a lot.  Hopefully I will get a chance to visit again before we leave, I just wish I could take the whole garden home with me next week! On Monday we had the day off, so we went to the Waterfront to do some souvenir shopping (and maybe some summer clothes shopping for ourselves), and of course got veggie burgers too! Overall, spending so much time outside and going to the waterfront again was such a nice way to spend the second-to-last weekend here and the end of spring break.