第880期:Water Adventures

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Peter: Hmm.

Jane: Some extreme sports?

Peter: Right, right. Yeah, it's, actually for a dry country it's interesting that it has so many water sports, people that really love water sports too especially on the eastern side of the country because it's tropical warm climate year-round. The sea temperature is quite warm and at the same time it has a lot of really big waves so I think two of the world's biggest surfing events are held in South Africa yearly. The one is near Jeffreys Bay and the other one is near Durban and that's where all the world's surf champions come to surf and test their skills. But if you're not into surfing you can go windsurfing which actually on the eastern coast is really famous because of the strong winds over there and the relatively, not calm seas, but actually there's a lot of open plains to do windsurfing on so it's really famous for that. And then like skiing and water skiing of course really famous too. People really enjoy the water sports.

Jana: Great. I also heard about diving.

Peter: Ah, yeah.

Jana: Diving in South Africa.

Peter: Yeah, that's, one, two interesting things. One is shark cage diving that people are really, have in recent years become interested in.

Jana: That sounds scary.

Peter: I think it is. One of the, actually the breeding colonies of the great white shark is in South Africa, I think the other one is in Australia, and people come there to go down in big steel cages to go and see some of these huge sharks and they dive with them and I think it's pretty dangerous but it's interesting for some people. 

Peter: The other thing that's really interesting diving in South Africa, also dangerous, is diving for treasure because of the ancient shipping route from Europe right past the Cape Point, the southernmost shipping route in the world. There's a lot of ships that sank because of the terrible weather in centuries past, over the last, I guess, five hundred years ships have sunk around the tip of Africa and people, divers come there to dive and find out if they can get some, if they can get rich basically diving for treasure and you get a lot of historical excavation as well. It's pretty dangerous too because there are two converging sea...

Jana: Currents.

Peter: Currents that meet and the one is warm and the one is cold so you have a really interesting combination of natural weather patterns at the same place so I guess a lot of ships sank because of all the storms in that area.

Jana: Wow, so treasure diving or wreck diving sounds more fun than shark diving.

Peter: I think so too but it depends on your interest I guess.