Cape Town

As we approached Cape Town on Tuesday evening, the sun was setting behind Table Mountain silhouetting it against a dark red sky. The view in the morning from the front room of the airbnb was equally stunning - Table Mountain was ‘right there’, not something expected when the place was booked. We took advantage of the superb clear and sunny weather that morning to walk up to the top (though ‘walk’ is perhaps not the right word) - the 779m ascent took about two hours over a distance of about 2kms (according the the app), but the track was popular for those who didn’t want to wait 90 minutes to get the cable car. Beautiful views of the city below and down the coast to the Cape were the rewards - as well as a very welcome cold beer at the top. We took the easy way down but were pleased with the morning’s exertions. 

Everyone we spoke to warned us off public transport (usually saying there wasn’t any in the city) and that Uber was the way to go, but later we took a Metro train out to the west to visit an old friend (Chris) for a quick visit in the afternoon, and then back into town for a nice meal in a harbour-side restaurant with other friends (Debbie and Paul) from London. 

Cape Town is a great destination - despite the traffic. This has to be the nicest city on the continent of Africa - it’s clean and organised, there are some excellent cafés and restaurants, stunning scenery. Aside from being on the water, the sudden contrast from Maputo is stunning, and most of the places to come are either inland and/or considerably less attractive than CT. Last time I was here was 1976: after my volunteer year in Durban, our trip home was on an old merchant steamship, the Clan Matheson, as a working passage. We spent ten days in the port while they unloaded and reloaded the ship - we were largely free to do what we wanted during the days in port, though I remember little of it except the mountain! We then sailed to Walvis Bay in Namibia for a further week, before the long haul north to Hull, arriving in the fog and driving rain on a late September day. The crew happily told us the old ship was overweight and top-heavy as they had added a load of shipping containers on the deck, which the ship was never designed to carry, but we got there anyway, and our ‘work’ on board was extremely light. Beats a plane anytime.

More trains the following day, down south to Simon’s Town and Boulders Beach to see penguins. The weather was much cooler and cloudier so we were lucky to have done the mountain climb the day before. We decided not to continue down to the Cape itself as it was cool and very windy, and we’d both been there before anyway. But some local travel advice: there ARE trains in Cape Town (and buses), and although it’s quite a limited network, we found them to be clean, on time, comfortable, and exceptionally good value. Ubers are definitely the next option, if the SIM card works!

Friday saw us heading out for a coffee to catch up with Jean & Len: Jean was former colleague from the publishing company I worked at briefly in Johannesburg (in around 1979 but some memory issues here), before the SA government told me to leave as I didn’t have the right visa. And then onwards - a train again, though an Uber at each end - to Stellenbosch and wine country for a night. More on that later.