The last stop on our journey was Cape Town, South Africa. As most are aware, Cape Town has a very colorful history, full of a lot of racial, ethnic, and religious strife. In fact, many roads have changed names because of the political strife in the past. We were told that one of the reasons that the residents of Cape Town are so kind is because they are trying to overcome their negative past. The information in this section is split up into history of Cape Town (which includes general information about Cape Town), history of Robben Island (including information about the Sharpville Massacre and Nelson Mandela), information about the…

To access Lesotho (leh-soo-too), we flew from Eswatini, through Johannesburg, to Durban (in South Africa). We were then driven 3 hours (in the most dense fog I’ve ever experienced – it was scary how poor the visibility was!) to Underberg, which is a town at the base of the Drakenburg Mountains, which span about 200km (125 mi) from North to South (we were in the south). There are Bushman paintings in the mountains and, as a result, the mountains are a UNESCO World Heritage site, which protects those paintings. When the fog cleared the next day, the scenery was stunning! Underberg (with a population of 100,000 people) is the closest…

Eswatini (which changed its name from Swaziland in 2018) was a 50 minute flight from Johannesburg, South Africa. Eswatini was the original name of the land, but it was not pronounced properly when it was under British Rule, so, they changed their name to Swaziland. Swaziland became independent in 1968, and it was not until the King’s birthday in 2018 that it was changed back by the king because “enough is enough.” Eswatini is 17,000sqkm (6563sqmi), with a population of 1.3 million people. While Manzini (the town we landed in) is heavily populated because of job opportunities and industry, it is not the capitol. In Manzini is a new airport,…