A Visit To The Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa

28 Feb A Visit To The Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa

Our motto and motivation is to “collect experiences, not things”. Whilst on our journey, we’re aiming to spend our time and money on spectacular experiences, to be left with incredible learnings and memories, not tangible objects. This way, we’re sure to keep our lives light without additional luggage, but also be the change we want to see in the world.

Our next featured experience is a visit to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered, we LOVE animals; furry ones, fluffy ones, slippery ones, and ones that can imitate other ones. I think my childhood dream (a long, long time ago) was to become a marine biologist…but then the urge to create things popped up when I left school, and well, the rest is history.

But despite my career choice, I’ll take any opportunity to spend time with animals, and luckily my other half feels the same. So when birthday time came around last week Wednesday for Stevo (yes, we are now both officially in our 30s, woohoo!) I had a day filled with activities planned, and number one on the activity list was a trip to the spectacular Two Oceans Aquarium at the V&A Waterfront.

From the moment you walk in, you feel like you’re breathing underwater, experiencing marine life with ocean locals. I had some fun sitting in the Clown Fish tank (well, I wasn’t sitting in it, but the tank’s been designed in a way that let’s you feel like a, um, clown), and we stumbled across gorgeous floor-to-ceiling enclosures filled with Eels, Rays, Sharks, and thousands of other species of fish.

The highlight, however, was when we had happy feet sitting in the Penguin beach with a Rockhopper Penguin named Hopper on our lap, as part of the Penguin encounter on offer by the Aquarium. No jokes. We scrubbed his tummy while our friendly guide told us fun stories about the relationship dynamics between the eight Rockhoppers that currently reside at Beach No.1, Two Oceans Aquarium, Dock Road, Cape Town (in summary, there’s a lot of girlfriend-boyfriend drama).

We’d seen Hopper and his feathered friends before on the Two Oceans Aquarium Instagram page, but it was super inspiring to hear in real life how much the Aquarium does for animal conservation and the environmental campaigns they run to promote simple behaviours that can save an entire species (like not using straws in drinks, which I have no officially stopped doing). I guess we’re all trying to do our bit to fix the shocking statistics, but it was really heartwarming to hear that there are companies devoted entirely to animal goodwill.

Thank you Two Oceans Aquarium for the perfect start to a birthday surprise. We will definitely be back, and hopefully Hopper will remember us.

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