Cape Town Pt. 1

After a good 27 hours in the air and four different airports, late last night I finally made it to Cape Town via Atlanta and Johannesburg. I cabbed it into the city center and checked in at the Tulip Hotel on the Strand.

This morning, I got an early start to my day as a super tourist. Having only 1 1/2 days in Cape Town, there was a lot to see and do. I left the Tulip around 9 this morning in order to walk around the city center and check out some of the Victorian architecture before it got too hot. After walking around the Grand Parade, City Hall, and the adjacent streets, I made for the Dutch East Indies Company Garden. The Garden stretches several blocks through the old city center and it lined with pieces of Dutch and English colonial history. I spent around an hour and half walking around before arriving at the South African National History Museum at the southern end of the DEIC gardens. For 15 rand (slightly over $2) I went in to look at some of the anthropological and ethnological history of South Africa, as well as some of the natural history surrounding the animals that used to and currently dwell here.


Afterwards, I had lunch at the restaurant inside the DEIC gardens and had a few cups of earl grey. From there, I walked to the Castle of Good Hope and spent nearly two hours wandering the grounds there. The Castle was the Dutch's first attempt at a permanent defense mechanism for repelling potential British incursions into the Cape Peninsula. It was built in the traditional Dutch and Prussian style where, from a bird's eye view, it resembles a five-pointed star with five gun battlements sticking out into the frontier. All the architecture looked like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean, with the colonial and colorful architecture very prominent.


After the Castle of Good Hope, I hopped on one of the cheesy red sightseeing buses to go to the cable car station for Table Mountain. Cape Town, outside the historic Victorian center, is not much of a walking town, and the sightseeing buses were drastically cheaper at 120R than taking a cab. We took a breathtaking ride up 1,067 meters to the top of Table Mountain, where I took more than a few pictures and enjoyed a half bottle of South African wine (my first sample). I spent about an hour and half there watching the fog roll in from the Eastern side of the peninsula and slowly engulf the mountains south of Table Mountain. Luckily, when we first got up there there wasn't a cloud in sight and so I got plenty of pictures. After the ocean winds came in more strongly closer to 5 o'clock, however, the air condensed into the "tablecloth" said to constantly grace Table Mountain.


I went back down via cable car around 6 and took the sightseeing bus along the Western side of the peninsula, stopping at Camps Bay to sit on the white sand beach for awhile and dip my toes in the Atlantic. Much to my surprise, the Atlantic is cold in the middle of summer. Apparently the summer winds that come off the mountains sweep west and take all of the warm surface waters out to see; the cold waters underneath the surface then rise up to take their place. The result was a very frigid surfline even while the sand part of the beach was thronging with people.



After leaving Camps Bay on the sightseeing bus, I came back to the hotel to charge my camera and get a shower before dinner. Once I was cleaned up, I headed back Northwest toward the Victoria & Albert waterfront to find somewhere to eat dinner. I settled on a place called Karibu for South African food; I didn't really have a clue as to where I was going to eat beforehand, so I figured I should just go with the local cuisine. Now I'm back at the hotel and ready for Robben Island tomorrow! The Third World could sure use better internet, but I guess that just shows me how good we have it in the West.