Honestly, I felt perfectly safe for my entire journey. That isn't to say that I wasn't warned. And I think I've been rather travel-savvy. There are do's and dont's. And you have to use your head.
Anyway, I did find it little humorous and confounding when I checked in, and I was giving this motley of keys. There's a remote, with 4 different buttons, to open the gates, and the front and back doors of the lobby. The long, ancient looking key operates the bathroom lock. The tiny, roundish key arms and disarms the alarm system (which I think I set of myself every single day I attempted to set it). The roundish key locked the metal bars on the sliding glass door. And the boxy key locked the sliding glass door.
I needed to review them a few times with our darling hostess Elizabeth to get it all straight :-)
I can happily recommend the Kolping Guesthouse, if somehow, somewhy you ever find yourself way out in Durbanville. It's a very comfortable, warm, inviting place.
I was "shocked" to see energized, electric razor fences around some of the apartments in the neighborhood.
And equally puzzled by the adverts for "Halt Armed Response", with a logo of dude with a spear leaping over a very angry wolf. Or something. There's going to have to be some bad sh*t going down for me to call those dudes.
Anyway, I had an odd predicament on Sunday, as I had to check out of my hotel around 10am, and my flight wasn't until 8:30pm. Moreover, the guest house was a whopping 30 miles from anything particularly interesting. So cabs to and from Cape Town, plus a cab to the airport, plus lugging around luggage all day wasn't particularly appealing.
As the strangest things often do, an interesting solution presented itself, as my cab driver drove me (for the second time) yesterday back to the guest house. Basically, I hired him for the day. He would pick me up at 10am on Sunday morning, drive me around for the entire day, and dropped me off at the airport around 6:30pm. All this for $120, which as quite a reasonable price (assuming you don't get mugged, kidnapped, or killed).
Well it was an absolutely wonderful day. I got to know Addy, my driver, and he got to know me. Brothers from different mothers, he said. I thought that was very nice :-)
We started the day with a stop at Camps Bay, for a little bit of time walking around the beach. It was yet another perfect summer day. It was still early morning for most beach bums, so it was mostly quiet.
Here you can see a bit of Signal Hill, from a very different perspective my previous day's hike up Table Mountain.
And this was the Blues restaurant where we had eaten earlier in the week. Quite a different feel during the daytime.
Addy, on the right, and I had a couple of coffees and a pastries for breakfast.
We stopped at a little fisherman's village (sorry, I've forgotten the name), where I bought a couple of souvenirs, and spotted this jellyfish swimming around in the water below.
I think this is one of the better pictures I took on this trip, of a mess of docked sailboats creaking and bobbing among the morning fog.
We made our way around the bay to the far side of the harbor, and started working our way up Chapman's Peak.
Looking back at the harbor, I could see quite a few impressive homes nestled in the hills.
The clouds were rolling in from the south and east, cold air and moisture sinking below these impressive, powerful peaks.
I thought this blanket of clouds hundreds of feet below was just beautiful.
Winding our way up, and around to Chapman's Peak...
The views of the mountains below got more and more dramatic.
This bird of prey was intently staring at something far, far below us.
These clouds were pouring, like a liquid into a basin, from the ocean on the left to the harbor on the right.
The rock overhang overhead here was pretty impressive.
Addy stopped at one of the local surfer playgrounds. These two gals were just one their way out to the water for the afternoon.
There was a good dozen or so surfers riding some decent waves.
I watched until the clouds overtook our position and we couldn't see the water anymore.
Not that I needed one, but we stopped a huge outdoor clearing house with literally thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of sculptures -- from elephant sized, to hand held busts such as these.
We also stopped at a nearby ostrich farm for a couple of pictures. I did see one ostrich running through the national park, in the wild, which was cool. But I got to get a lot closer to these domesticated ones :-)
This guy strutted right over to me with enough confidence that I back off of the fence several feet!
Speaking of feet, ostriches have the weirdest feet I think I've ever seen on any animal. They look almost like dinosaurs (I guess?).
After that, we made our way into the Cape of Good Hope and the Table Mountain National Park.
Immediately upon entering the park, a wild baboon streaked by our car. I only managed to snap this one crappy picture, but oh my, wow! I mean, a baboon just on the other side of my window! It didn't look very happy, so we didn't stalk it for another picture. Addy expected that we would have seen more baboons, but alas, this was the only one.
Entry to the National Park was surprisingly expensive. Addy says that he takes his family here once a year for a holiday, but he agreed that entry was quite pricey.
Throw these coordinates into your map, or look up Cape Point in Google Maps, and start zooming out. I'm betting that's a very, very long way from wherever you are right now... Boggles my mind.
So this is an old light house at the very top and tip of Cape Point. When I took this picture of myself, I was originally quite pleased that I managed to get myself and the lighthouse perfectly in the picture. Upon further inspection (when I got the picture loaded onto my computer), I noticed that there is a HUGE wedgie falling out of my right ear :-)
I did not hike down to this secluded beach, but it did look quite inviting.
Even with the fog and being among the clouds, it was really, really bright, and hard to open my eyes without sunglasses on.
I hiked up a couple of hundred feet to the top where the lighthouse was, and looked down at some pretty violent breakers. You wouldn't want to swim down there. Oh, and the Atlantic is ice cold down here.
It's hard to tell from here, but that's hundreds of penguins on the rocks! More on penguins later...hang with me...
That's the Atlantic Ocean behind me, and roughly 10,000 miles in that direction is my home in Austin, Texas. Surreal.
So I finished up my time on Cape Point and our next stop was a little beach along the Cape that's full of ....
Of course my association with Linux necessitates a love of penguins. But come on, these things friggin' adorable!
I mean, they'll waddle right up to you...
And look you right in the eye.
I got a kick out of their feet too. Scaly with big honking claws.
Their little wings were cute too. It had an interesting looking texture, but I dared not touch it, as their beaks looked really sharp.
This mama penguin was sitting on an egg.
Yeah, check that out, a veritable penguin egg.
And what comes from penguin eggs, but penguin chicks :-)
They were quite playful, waddling around the rocks...
Taking a swim, and then cleaning themselves off.
This guy was just too cool for school. He was done with all of that waddling and settled into a prone position.
Waddle waddle!
Peck and clean!
Play in the water! Okay, I'll stop now. I took hundreds of pictures :-)
On a more serious note, I guess it's hard to talk about Africa without talking about some its social issues, of which it has had plenty. We drove by Khayelitsha, with over a half million people living in this "shanty town".
My driver, Addy, and I talked extensively about his 40 years in South Africa, the various changes that he's seen in his time. I answered, as best as I could, his questions and curiosities about America and the United States. Somewhat quirky, he was absolutely obsessed with Chuck Norris and his character Walker, Texas Ranger. I fed him as much trivia as I possibly could about Chuck Norris and the real Texas Rangers :-)
Next, we visited a cheetah rescue farm. They have about 20 of these enormous cats on the premises.
There was a handler there in the cage. I was pretty blown away by how affectionate the cheetah was with her. It purred as loudly as a small gasoline engine.
For 30 Rand (about 5 bucks), you could spend 10 minutes in the cage petting a cheetah. Seven years in, I'm still not a big fan of Kim's cat, so I didn't bother :-)
Attached to the cheetah facility was an extensive exhibit with 75+ birds of prey. In fact, there were a few pictures of Mark Shuttleworth on the wall. It seems he's quite the celebrity in these parts.
There was a sleepy Anatolian sheep dog napping in the field. It made me miss my puppies quite a bit.
The birds of prey exhibit was really incredible. This vulture looked like something out of a cartoon.
And this "secretary bird" was bizarre too.
The polka dots on this bird's chest are quire quite distinctive.
This black eagle was pretty suspect of my intentions. I'm not sure, but I think it might have looked directly into my soul. Yikes.
This bird almost looked like a Jim Henson puppet.
This African fish eagle looks a lot like American bald eagles, with a bit more white on the head.
You would not want to tangle with these talons.
I accidentally deleted the video (bummer!), but these two owls would dance when the handler played music on his cell phone. Totally hilarious!
Closing out my day, we made one final stop at a nearby vineyard. There's nearly a hundred vineyards in the area, but exactly one that we could find open past 4:30pm on a Sunday.
So we made our way over to Peter Falke Wines. Not Peter "Faulk" Columbo, but Peter "Falke".
The tasting room was, like Groot Constantia, a Dutch style farmhouse.
It had a very modern, progressive vibe on the inside.
But the weather was glorious outside.
So we had a seat in the shade. At my urging, Addy joined me and had a juice while I tasted the estate wines. He tried olives for the first time, but really didn't like them :-)
I made my way through several whites and a rose'.
And made my way onto the reds.
I enjoyed every wine I had from Peter Falke, and was really disappointed to learn that they didn't export to the States.
My time in South Africa had very rapid come to an end. I talked my excellent driver, Addy, into taking a picture with me.
And I gave him my Ubuntu lanyard, as a very small remembrance of our excellent Sunday together.
Without reservation, I hope to make it back to Cape Town sometime soon! I know that Kim would enjoy the beach and wine country, surely. I'd love to get out a bit further into the countryside, perhaps for a safari. It's a wonderful country, with very hospitable people, beautiful landscapes, and interesting cuisines. I do you you get a chance to visit some day too.
:-Dustin
Really enjoyed all the picts. SA is beautiful. A lot to overcome, but what resources in people, heritage, country. Would like to go - would like to study.
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