Free swim with the Great Whites

The water at this particular beach was the most perfect I've encountered in South Africa, so as soon as I had the chance I swam out as far as my lungs would take me and floated on my back. After about 20 perfect minutes of this, one of the local fishermen motioned me in. When I got to the shore I was told that these fishermen had seen THREE Great Whites out there just moments before I'd swam out and apparently didn't see me floating on my back for awhile.

So I can officially say that I swam with Great White sharks... and I didn't even have to pay the usual 2000 rand tourist fee for it! :)

When I got back to Cape Town there were headlines lining the Main Road about the huge amount of shark attacks lately. A few women have gotten eaten completely. Though I'd like to attribute my not running into these deadly beasts to Divine Providence, that's tough to do in South Africa for a lot of reasons.

One of these reasons is the Battle of Blood River (1838), in which the Afrikaners asked God to give them victory over the Zulu, in spite of the fact that they were seriously out-numbered (470 versus 10,000). In exchange, they offered God a lot of things, not least that they'd never sin again. They won that battle by a landslide (3,000 Zulu dead, 3 Afrikaners wounded) and attributed it to Divine Providence. Because God had offered them unequivocal proof that He was on their side, this justified to many of them the eventual construction of Apartheid and all the inhuman acts toward the local peoples in between.

So, in short, I think a person's got to be careful about attributing things to God. Nevertheless, I'm still glad I did not find a shark.