Cape Town Update

We are again writing from Cape Town, where we have thouroughly enjoyed our time thus far, with the exception of a couple of drawbacks. Yesterday, as promised, we made our way to Table Mountain with the goal of hiking to the summit. There are several routes to the top. We decided to take the steeper route, which was also supposed to be quicker.

I don't know how to spell the name of the trail, but it is named after the gorge that it runs up through. I think it is something like Pradaledijk. This area has been suffering from some severe drought. Much of the landscape around is charred from fires. There are some very nice stands of trees at the base of the Mountain that were completely ruined in recent fires. Despite the brown landscape, the area is still very scenic. Here I am near the bottom of the trail just after I started my stopwatch. The trail guide claimed that we should allow around 2.5 hours to get to the top, so I wanted to be sure that we would do it in much less time. Larissa was hoping for more of a relaxing time. It was quite hot, and very sunny, and we soon got overheated. For some reason Larissa was not sweating at all, so she got overheated much worse than I did. We had to take our time to the top, but I was happy to see that we made it in well under two hours. The view from the 3000ft.+ summit is very nice. On one side of the plateau (which is surprisingly green on top) there are excellent views of Cape town,

and on the other side are views of the penninsula. At the top there were many dussies scurrying around. They look like your average rodent, but they are apparently fairly closely related to elephants.

Elephants used to live around here, but the Dussie is said to be the closest remaining relative. I think that dussies are probably the sort of thing that locals are annoyed with, but tourists are excited about. We enjoyed them. Not wanting to be too hard on our knees, we decided to take the cable car down, which turned out to be a very quick but enjoyable way to get down and spend $20.

This morning we picked up a rental car with the intention of exploring Table Mountain National Park and Cape Point. We enjoyed the morning part of our drive, as it was very scenic, and the weather was very nice. I told Larissa that I had seen some clouds billowing over Table Mountain this morning. She told me that this sight is reffered to as the Tablecloth. A few seconds later she admitted that she just realized what that meant. It indeed looks like the mountain is draped with a white tablecloth.

Here is one of the sights we enjoyed on our drive:

We eventually reached the entrance to the national park. Unfortunately there was an entrance fee that we had not expected, around $15 for both of us. When you are trying to live on $50 a day, which needs to cover food and lodging, $15 is an intimidating expense. We sat in the car for awhile at the entrance trying to decide what to do. We weren't quite sure why, but cars kept pulling off the road right next to us. They would stop for awhile, and then move on. We didn't pay to much attention to it. Just as we were ready to make a decision on whether we would enter, we noticed a few zebras grazing next to us. All the people were stopping to look and take pictures. So, the zebras convinced us to suck it up and pay the entrance fee. Later we noticed that they are enclosed by a small fence, so are essentially zoo animals, but oh well. There is quite a bit of wildlife in the park. We bumped into many ostriches, antelopes, and baboons, the latter of which are quite a nuissance around here. People have fed them enough that they equate humans with an opportunity to eat. They are not shy about trying to get what they want.

By the time we entered the park the weather had turned sour. It was very windy and the area was covered in a blanket of fog. We could tell that there were some great views around, but it was hard to tell just how great they were.

We were sure to visit the Cape of Good Hope, which is the Southwestern most point of Africa.

Larissa picked out the pictures for this post, so I am the subject in this picture as well as most of the others. There were a lot of dussies at this spot. I wanted Larissa to pose for a picture while they crawled around her and on her lap. Unfortunately, they thought that her arms and especially her toes would make a great meal. She did not want to let them do more than taste, as could be a really bad thing. Apparently these guys are used to being fed by humans as well.

We started driving back on the other side of the Penninsula in the mid-afternoon. We stopped by a place that is known as "The Boulders," which hosts one of the only two land based colonies of penguins in Africa. They are known most commonly as Jackass Penguins due to their call, which resembles the hee-haa of a donkey. I guess there has been a push to refer to them as African Penguins. They hang out on the indian ocean side of the penninsula, which is smart because the water is much warmer there than on the atlantic ocean side.

It is nesting season right now, so many of the penquins were up in the bushes looking after there eggs. They did not seem to be intimidated by our presence.

We had hoped to get to visit the Adventist College near here, but by the time we visited all of these sights, and endured some traffic heading back to Cape Town, it was already near dark. We really enjoyed our day, but we are both a bit worried about how much we will have to pay for a little mistake I made. I thought that driving on the wrong side of the road would be the main risk to our rental vehicle, but it turned out to be a high rocky curb. When backing out of a parking space I swung the wheel too tight and rubbed one side of the bumper pretty raw.

It looks wose in real life than it does in the picture, the car that is. One thing is for sure, we will be well over budget for Cape Town.

Just in case you need help figuring out where we have been, I borrowed a map. In white is the landlocked country of Lesotho where we spent almost two weeks. From there we took a bus to the southwestern portion of South Africa where Cape Town is located. That little finger you see there next to Cape Town is what we explored today. Tomorrow we are going to fly back to Johannesburg, and then on the Paris and then Prague. Wish us luck with the car agency, and with our travels.