Hi everybody. I'm now in the country of South Africa and I'd like to tell you about my trip so far ...
 
First, we landed in Cape Town and took a cab to our new friend Richard's house, where we stayed for a few nights. We did some cool things while we were visiting with him and his daughter Georga. We visited a bird and monkey park and saw all types of African birds like parrots, ostriches, and owls. After looking at the birds, we checked out the monkeys and actually went into their cages, where we saw a few babies hanging on their mother's backs.

Here's Georga, Stefan, and myself at the bird park:
 
After spending more time with Richard and his daughter, who's two years younger than Stefan, we left them to go to a place called Grootbos. While we were there we saw my Dad's friend Michael, who owns the resort, and we went to his house for a "braai," which is a South African barbeque. Instead of coals, you use wood and fire it up and burn it down to charcoal before cooking. We had fun meeting Michael and staying at Grootbos, and the braai dinner was great. The next morning, we went for a whale-watching tour and got really lucky because the whales happened to stay very late in the area this year and we got to see 12 of them! There were six mothers and calves. One pair came right up to the boat and rolled over on top of each other.
 
From Grootbos we went back to Cape Town to meet our friends Owen, Tess, Parker and Hailey, who came to visit us on their vacation. Stefan and I were both so excited to have friends from home coming to visit us in Africa. We spent a couple of days with them exploring Cape Town and then brought them back to Grootbos to check that out too. Visiting Grootbos with them was really cool because we did something really unique to the area--we went in a shark cage.

Here's our boat:

Everybody from our group got into a cage in the freezing Atlantic Ocean with GREAT WHITE SHARKS!!! They attract the sharks by putting fish oil into the water. Then, they throw bait attached to a rope towards the shark to bring it closer to the cage, which is alongside the boat, so the shark swims right up to you. It was amazing to see them up close like that.

Now we are all heading off to go on safari, which I'll tell you about later. Bye for now!