Our Internet access has been a bit of a hit and miss affair so I apologise to my avid readers if you have been waiting with baited breath for my next installment!
The last few days have kept us very busy. The adjenda for Monday changed slightly as Lea woke up feeling unwell which meant we had to postpone our bus tour of the city and visit to Robben Island. Instead, we leaft Lea back at the apartment and the kids and I went back to the V&A to soak up more of the atmosphere of the place and visit the Two Oceans aquarium. This place was pretty cool, I've never seen an aquarium with living box jelly fish as an exhibit nor tanks so deep as to be able to grow kelp forrests which are a common occurrence around the shores of Cape Town. They also had a clown fish tank with two of the largest clowns I've ever seen inside!!
After early bed times and a good night's sleep for all of us, Tuesday morning brought recharged batteries and the promise of more splendid weather. We took the famous red double decker City Siteseeing bus on a tour of the city, taking in the sites of the CBD, Green Square markets and the infamous District 6 area, a former inner-city residential area where over 60,000 of its black inhabitants were forcedly removed during the 1970s by the apartheid regime. Many of the building were bulldozed at the time and much of the area is still unused wasteland today. The tour also ventured over to Camps Bay, "where you go to see scantily clad bronzed babes" as the tour guide tells us. it is the playground of Cape Town's rich and famous and if we were lucky (as we were told) we might see a famous personality. If I knew any rich and/or famous Cape Townians I might have been more impressed but since I don't, I settled for the scantily clad bronzed babes instead!!
Being a hop-on hop-off affair, one of the bus tour stops was the Table Mountain Cableway Terminal. If I had to list a highlight of highlights of our stay in Cape Town, Table Mountain has to be it. As I've said before the mountain dominates the city from below and when you get the 1,085m summit, it dominated from above too. The views are spectacular and I am sure no photo or written word comes anywhere close to being able to describe the breathtaking beauty and power this mountain exerts on its environment.
For those of you who don't know, South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup. last night I thought Cape Town was hosting it again. For about an hour in the early evening, the roads outside our apartment (which leads to the soccar stadium built especially for the World Cup), became a mad house (or street). I thought the driving standards of South African's was questionable at the best of times. Fill up several thousand cars with mad vuvuzela blaring fans, give them free rein of the car horn and the optional extra of actually being inside the car/van/bus/whatever when driving along and you end up with an out of this world spectial and a cacophony of sound that was unbelievable!!. I'm assuming the home side lost because we didn't hear same said vuvuzela blaring fans later in the evening on the way home!!
This morning (Wednesday) heralded the start of our final full day in Cape Town. Our plans changed again for two reasons. The first being the spectacular weather we had been experiencing up until now took a turn for the worst bringing low cload and rain and secondly, the hire car we picked up turned out to be too small to fit all 5 of us and our luggage! Foreseeing this exact problem back home, I had gone to great pains with the car hire company during the lead up to our trip to ensure that this was not going to be an issue. Turns out the "or similar" vehicle they chose to give us allowed either 5 people OR 5 bags, not AND!! This could have been a game breaker, or else another slug to the hip pocket to go to much bigger car - actually an 8 seater van (something I really wanted to avoid as we were having the car for so long). Anyway, short story long, we managed to get a replacement car just in time before we had to head off on our postponed trip to Robben Island.
I did mention it was raining didn't I? Well, in Cape Town, when the weather turns bad, the wind picks up. And when it gets windy, they stop the boats to the island (there's a idea for you Tony Abbott) so that was the end of that. We can't complain though. We all agreed that it would have been much worse if we missed out on Table Mountain as that was closed too due to the fact that you could not see the top from the bottom, so I'm assuming if you were at the top, you would not be able to see the bottom!!
One thing I did forget to mention which was really cool (at least us boys thought so) was the spot of fossicking we did this morning whilst waiting for our replacement car. I'd heard about a beach just outside of Cape Town where fossilised sharks teeth can be found. Since I'd promised the boys we would go, we all braved the wind and the rain and headed out to Milnerton beach to give it a go. I wasn't expecting much but the boys were really excited. With the full brunt of what seemed like a force 9 gale blowing in off the Atlantic into our faces, we ventured off. Lea and Ash lasted about 5 seconds before retreating back to the shelter of the car. For reasons beyond me we were the only three on the beach but the wind and the rain did eventually subside which must have been a lucky omen for the boys as they came up trumps with two very impressive, very big teeth!!
Our time in Cape Town has come to an end. We leave the opulence of our rockstar apartment (and hopefully this crappy weather) and hit the coast road east to L'Agulhas via the Cape of Good Hope and Hermanus, where we have been told there are many whales basking in the bay. Our next stop will be for a few days on the southernmost tip of the African continent. It's quite remote and I doubt I'll be able to post another blog there so until next time...(I really need to learn some Afrikaans!!!)
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