Cape Town is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and, to be honest, it is a richly deserved accolade. It’s a real city in that it has docks and a central business district and bad industrial sites etc but it is set in the most astounding scenery. Table Mountain and the associated mountains rise over 1000m directly over the city and provide an amazing backdrop.
It feels like many southern cities (Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne). There’s a degree of “coolness” to the city but the chic feels a little pasted on on top of the old colonial feel. There’s a lot of raw big boned blokes in boots and a sensible hat who look like they could shear a sheep, bring down a wildebeest or drink a gallon of beer walking past the Sharper Image and the interiors shops.
We spent Saturday chilling out in the Cape Grace Hotel and doing a bit of shopping in the Victoria and Albert Waterfront development. As I said in the previous entry, it’s indistinguishable from the South Street Seaport in New York. It is very much targeted at the new middle class in South Africa and is a pleasant example of the genre. We ate at a very nice Belgian/African fusion restaurant called Den Anker. Ostrich steaks and slow cooked Springbok on the menu. Very very nice indeed. We had an absolutely superb pinotage wine. It’s worth noting here that at 7 rand to the Dollar or 14 rand to the pound, South Africa is very very cheap indeed. Den Anker is a pretty up-scale restaurant and most main courses were less than 8 pounds.
On Sunday we decided to brave the roads and drive down to the end of the cape. Breakfast was enlivened by a classical Hannah comment. They have the usual “two eggs any style with your choice of sausages, bacon, beans etc” breakfast at the Cape Grace. Hannah asked for “two eggs without the eggs, just the bacon”. How we laughed. We picked up the hire car keys and headed out on the roads of Cape Town. Some trepidation. In fact, the roads in Cape Town (and South Africa) are perfect. Better than the roads in the UK. We’d decided to drive round the Chapman’s Point road which is one of the most spectacular roads in the world. It makes Highway 1 which goes from L.A. to San Francisco look like the north circular. Unfortunately we could only go about 4km up the road before it was closed for maintenance but the bit that we drove was spectacular.
A bit of a detour over the spine of the cape brought us to Hout Bay and then along the coast through Fish Hoek to Simon’s Town. This little seaside town is an almost faithful reproduction of a slightly faded British sea side town. However, it’s almost completely unspoiled. There are still the original cast iron built Victorian shops with verandas and balconies. Unlike any British sea side town, there are towering mountains and the wide blue Indian Ocean as a backdrop.
The “end of africa” is only about 30km from Cape Town but the last 10 or 15km are a national park. This part of Africa is home to the Fynbos. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, there are 6 different floral kingdoms in the world and the smallest and rarest is the Fynbos. There are thousands of species of flowers and plants which are found nowhere else in the world and are restricted to this very small pocket of Mediterranean climate. Table Mountain on it’s own has more than 2000 species of plants which is more than the whole of the United Kingdom. Amazing eh? There are also some amazingly smelly baboons, zebra, tortoise etc.
The cape splits into two right at the end. On one side is Cape Point where there’s a light house, a restaurant and the inevitable visitor center and gift shop. We zoomed up to the top and then set out on the walk to the Cape of Good Hope which is the furthest south and is where <do your deep movie trailer voice> “two oceans collide“! It was a wonderful walk along the cliffs with huge crashing waves (some larger than a “lions foot” – in-joke I’m afraid). The wind blew, the sun came out and path wound on and then finally we were standing on the Cape of Good Hope. The End of Africa.
On the way back we passed a group of four frenchmen who were so hot they’d taken off their trousers in an attempt to cool down. The French truly are an inscrutable people. An easy drive home through the extremely exclusive developments of Constantia and we were back in the superb Cape Grace to pack for the next leg of our journey. Whales and diving with Great White Sharks at Grootbos…eek.
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