Cape of Good Hope

Pretoria

Yesterday was one of those days that a person will remember forever.  After my early morning meeting, I set off with a friend on a journey of discovery.  I hired a car and driver for the day, made a list of three places I really wanted to see, and we set off for a drive in the countryside. Even the weather co-operated: warm and breezy with a clear blue sky.

Driving down the coast was amazing.  The small towns perch between the mountains and the sea. They’re not really mountains, more like big piles of rock and flattened on the top.  Many of them are reddish and you can clearly see the layers in them.  Muizenberg was one of the first ones we came to – a nice mix of old houses and new ones.  Many of the old ones date back to the early 1900s and have thatched roofs and are finished with a kind of stucco and painted white. From a distance, the scenery looks strangely Mediterranean. We passed a couple of new ones perched halfway up the mountain with their own private cable car!  Easy to see that it doesn’t snow or ice up here.

There’s lots of surfing along here, but lots of sharks too.  For people who want to swim, there are concrete swimming pools that fill up with water when the tide is high, and then the water stays there when the tide goes out.

Best sign seen along the road, “You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic”

Next stop: the south coast at a penguin breeding ground.  It’s the first time I’ve ever seen them not in a zoo and they are every bit as cute in the wild.  There were lots of babies too, many of them brown and fuzzy. I didn’t even know that penguins lived in Africa.  These are African penguins, formerly known as Jackass penguins because their call sounds pretty much like a donkey.  There were lots of gulls too, apparently because gulls eat baby penguins, another reason not to like them.  There were many adult penguins sitting on nests, and more or less sitting on their babies.  Their nests are more or less holes in the sand filled with dried grass.  In one of the nests there were two babies, and the adult seemed to be fairly precariously perched on top.

I thought the day couldn’t get any better, but then we went to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point. It’s a strange feeling to stand in a place that you have heard about all of your life, and read about, and heard stories about.  Cape Point is where the warm water from the Pacific side meets the cold water from the Atlantic side, and it’s one of the windiest places I’ve ever been in my life.  The original lighthouse was erected in 1860, but the weather was so bad that it was frequently hidden by fog.  After many shipwrecks, they built another lighthouse lower down.

I climbed up to the old lighthouse – it was prefabricated and then moved into position.  I would really like to know how they got it up there.  It’s so steep and windy that the lighthouse keeper lived in a little house down below.  The Cape of Good Hope is not actually the furthest south point in Africa, but it was the point where early sailors travelling south turned eastwards, and the beginning of really rough water. It’s hard to believe when you face south that the next stop is Antarctica, and it’s over 6000 km away.

When I was completely windblown, we went to a winery in Constantia. They’ve been making wine there for over 350 years, and it was absolutely beautiful to see the miles of vineyards spreading up and over the hills.  There was a restaurant there so we stopped to eat, and enjoy a glass of wine (or two).  We were able to eat outside, the sun was just warm enough and we were protected from the wind by the buildings.  There’s something magical about eating a good meal with friend, looking out over the countryside.

Last step of the day was to drive back to Cape Town on the western side of the Cape. This is where the rich people seem to  gather, judging by the houses and cars.  It’s easy to see why – long curving white sand beaches in small bays, less wind, and a more gentle slope to the mountain so houses can be built higher and higher and guarantee a view. As usual, it was the older houses that interested me – some of them looking like castles.

Finally back to the hotel.  I lay down on the bed, intending to get up and write in a few minutes; woke up when it was dark to crawl into bed, and had a luxurious sleep.