Apartheid, Dassies, A Wine-Pairing Dinner, Two Capes and Penguins- We Finish Cape Town

Our first day in Cape Town started with breakfast followed by a lecture in the hotel’s library on apartheid. We were vaguely familiar with this topic which made sensational news in the 50’s and 60’s, but as teenagers then, we were thinking more about the opposite sex than racial oppression and protests in South Africa.

The District Six Museum

Our lecturer proved to be very interesting, since he actually lived through this time. Spending 14 years in exile to avoid imprisonment, he detailed the apartheid history and the laws and enforcement that proved to be one of the darker periods in South African history.

Table Mountain

The tour originally had been scheduled for a trip to Robben Island, South Africa’s version of the U.S. Alcatraz, where Nelson Mandela and other black leaders were imprisoned. Even though the island lies only 4 miles from the mainland, the seas in this area are generally difficult to navigate. After a ferry took on water this past summer necessitating the emergency evacuation of passengers, the tour company decided to change the itinerary in the interest of tour group safety. In its place we toured the Sixth District Museum, a museum dedicated to the apartheid displacement of several thousand blacks and coloreds. The museum is located in an old Methodist church and chronicles the government’s removal of blacks and rebuilding the area for white families. While the museum enlightened us on apartheid’s severity, we don’t think it would be as interesting as a visit to Robben Island. We were treated to a quick city tour of Cape Town. Established in the late 17^th to early 18^th centuries, Cape Town was established by the Dutch West India Company as a refreshment station for ships sailing the long route between the Amsterdam and the East Indies.

A dassie or rock hyrax

We saw many statues and memorials commemorating Cape Town’s history and walked through a botanical park known as the Company’s Garden. While the company originally maintained large gardens to supply the ships, today this park is just a remnant of the original.

View of Cape Town from Table Mt.

No trip to Cape Town is complete without a visit to Table Mountain whose main feature is 2-mile wide level plateau rising 3,563 feet above sea level.

Flanked by the two peaks, Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, the formations form an impressive backdrop to the city and Table Bay harbor. A visit to this national park which extends down the entire Cape Peninsula cannot always be guaranteed as the formation orographic clouds often enshroud the mountain, limiting visibility, or high winds can prevent the cable lifts from operating. As we ended our museum tour, our guide decided that conditions then were as good as they might get.

Steenberg Vinyards grounds

We rode to the mountain and took the lift to the top. The views were spectacular, blocked only occasionally by cloud formation. Table Mountain has an unusually rich flora biodiversity with over 2200 species of plants forming part of the Cape Floral Region protected sites, a World Heritage Site. We saw several types of lizards and the mountain’s most common mammal—the dassie or rock hyrax. We descended the mountain and rode back to our hotel to spend an afternoon resting and napping.

That evening we were treated to Cape Winelands wine-pairing dinner at Catharina’s Restaurant in the Steenberg Vineyards.

Ready for dinner!

Located in the Constantia Valley about 20 minutes from central Cape Town, the vineyards were the first farm established on the Cape Peninsula in 1682. The restaurant is named after the original owner, Catharina Ustings Ras, who was the first woman to have title to land on the cape. We were given a short tour of the grounds, before enjoying an excellent four-course dinner and wine pairings. We also enjoyed lively dinner conversation with our fellow dinner mates as well as an entertaining story about Catharina, her 5 husbands, and the start of Steenberg Vineyards. This was definitely one of our more memorable dinners.

View of Hout Bay

We rode the bus back to the hotel and got ready for our final day in Cape Town.

We're here!!

Coordinates for Cape of Good Hope

We arose early the next morning to get ready for a full day of sightseeing. Today we are going to go all the way to the end of Cape Peninsula to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope all of which are in the Table Mountain N.P. We had breakfast and boarded our bus which took us on a highway that ran along the western Atlantic coast of the peninsula. The road was carved into the sides of the mountains and was quite twisty, and it reminded us of the Big Sur Highway in California. Jane didn’t like the sheer cliffs, but it was reassuring that driving on the left side of the road kept us close to the mountains with a lane to buffer us, even though we never saw any part of that lane from our window. We passed through the expensive seaside communities of Camps Bay, Bakoven, Llandudno, Hout Bay (where our guide lives), Nordhoek, and on down to the Cape. Arriving at the Cape of Good Hope presented a photo op jam at the marker.

Beach near Cape of Good Hope

View from atop Cape Point

Our guide solved this by everyone lining up, giving your camera, running behind the sign and having your picture taken, and then he gives your camera to another guide who holds it while you come around the sign to retrieve your camera while the next person follows in behind you. Brilliant! We tied up the sign while all 25 tour members had their picture taken with everyone else standing around waiting for us to finish. While the common perception is that the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet at the Cape of Good Hope, this actually occurs at Cape Agulhas some 60 miles to the east. However, two ocean currents, the cold Benguela current of the Atlantic Ocean and the warm Agulhas current of the Indian do meet here. The Cape of Good Hope is advertised as the most southwestern point (Cape Agulhas is further south) of the African continent.

After the photos were taken we took some photos of the beach and ocean and then proceeded to Cape Point. Cape Point lies to the east and a little north of the Cape of Good Hope. It is here, though, that is home to the lighthouse that lights the tip of the peninsula.

Lighthouse at Cape Point

A beautiful (and tasty!) eland

After getting a warning about not taking food outside the bus, because it attracts aggressive baboons, we hopped a funicular which took us to the top of the mountain where the lighthouse is located. We had some spectacular 360° views at the top. As we left Cape Point, we spotted two eland, the largest and perhaps most elegant of all antelopes.
We were fortunate that one of them elected to pose for us.

Our final stop for the day was Simon’s Town where we would have lunch and then view a colony of African penguins.

A group of penguins

Lunch was good, but the penguin viewing was fantastic. Of the 18 species of penguins in the southern hemisphere, the African penguin, an endangered species, is the only species that is indigenous to Africa.

Cooling off!

We found the African penguins to have approximately the same size and markings as the Magellenic penguins we saw in the Falkland Islands. However, charts posted along the walkway depicted the differences these penguins have with other similar species.

Singing or sun gazing?!

These penguins mate for life and breed in January. The Boulders Beach we visited is one of three sites in South Africa that attract these birds. What we found interesting was that this colony lived within 100 yards of a beachside residential neighborhood.

After viewing the penguins, we headed back to our hotel. We had a drink at the whiskey bar (over 500 kinds) and then headed to our room to begin packing for checkout tomorrow. We settled our account and turned in for tomorrow’s flight to Kruger N.P. and the start of our 4-day safari!