Day 5: Capetown, Cape Point, Cape Good Hope

Monday , 16, January 2017 Leave a comment

After spending a few days in Cape Town, we ventured out of the city with a tour company to check out Cape Point, which our guide was careful to point out was the most southwesterly point of Africa; Cape Algulhas is actually the southern most point.  We wouldn’t be making it there, despite someone’s fascination with arbitrary superlatives.

Our tour group was maybe 12 people, mainly European, to the extent that describes Brits…  The tour started in the old Cape Malay community, Bokaap, known for brightly painted houses, in which regard it didn’t disappoint:

See? It could be a Tide commercial in a world where we laundered our homes.

The tour guide told us a story about why the houses were painted such bright colors (and, like Boston, it wasn’t to help drunks identify their house).  In what was supposed to be a shocking reveal, but just seemed…  obvious, it turns out people painted their houses bright colors because they both could and wanted to.

After this, we drove out and around Table Mountain and made our way to Boulder Beach on the Cape Peninsula, best known for its Cape Penguin colony.  Despite the wind whipping around sand at lacerating rates, we spent a ton of time ogling waterfowl (can we call them that?) and quietly wondering why so much time had been allotted to…  penguins.  Which is a weird thing to say for an animal-obsessive, but seriously, penguins don’t do much.  Except these two lovebirds:

*dorbz

We followed this up by getting back in the car and driving further south to the actual Cape Point, where we piled out of the car to clamber up the very top of the Cape of Good Hope.  Which was pretty nice!  Unlike with the penguins, unfortunately, we weren’t allotted a ton of time, so we had to kinda rush up and down.    The photo-op friendly Cape of Good Hope sign was the scene of a great number of people friendlyly fighting for time by themselves. ( One thing that gives me joy is seeing huge groups of people all taking the same photo; I loved this.- brs)

After this, we made our way back to the city, stopping at a beautiful vineyard to get some great wine, though our tour company was def getting a major  kickback from the vineyard in exchange for customers.  But that’s okay!  On the way home, we had a little adventure when a big open-top sightseeing bus was doing some DIY tree-trimmming and caused a giant branch to come crashing down on our van.  Pretty intense!

The tour was pretty good, but it was a lot of driving.  The tour company prided itself on being young and hip, which was…  maybe not so great.  There was a kind of post-whatever blase attitude about tours.  They weren’t gonna bore us with all the details of everything we were seeing, just taking us to the places we wanted to go!  But, you know, it’s a tour, so maybe a little bit more memorized patter would have been a good thing.

Our driver dropped us at the Company’s Garden, which was right by our apartment.  IT’s also the location of a big museum (which I forget) but it was closed, and the old synagogue, also closed.  But the garden was nice, especially the cats and squirrels.  We stopped in an open cathedral on the way home and sneakily watched choir practice!

Dinner was the Planet Restaurant, located in a hotel run by the same people who ran the hotel featured during our aperitif honeymoon last June.  And it was delicious, again!  No photos there, alas, but it did have a gorgeous starry chandelier.

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