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Cape Town: Table Mountain by cable car
Posted by daveb on October 7th, 2008
After paragliding, this is what I had really been looking forward to: To walk atop the magnificent Table Mountain and suck-in the views. (The views from the paraglider were excellent, but I was perhaps a little too nervous of the landing to fully appreciate what was laid out before my eyes at the time.)
Whilst not cheap, the cable car is faster and safer than walking up the mountain. I would like to have walked but for two reasons: There has been increased tourist muggings on the pathway up and Squiffy hates walking uphill!
As you’ll see from the photos, the views over Cape Town and the ocean are spectacular. We were level with the cloud line and looked down on the paragliders from our morning flight. There were some abseilers leaning over the lip of the tabletop. I was 45% tempted to have a go myself but decided against it as I was still coming down (pun intended) from the excitement of this morning’s paraglide.
Our taxi driver had lived in Cape Town for over thirteen years and had never been up Table Mountain. I was gobsmacked. The view from the top is one of the best in the world and I urge people not to miss this experience!
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Farewell, Five Dollar Tent
Posted by daveb on October 6th, 2008
Now that we’ve arrived in Cape Town, we no longer need our Five Dollar Tent and so have donated it to the townships. If they can’t use it directly, they’ll be able to sell it to raise money for their projects. Let’s hope they get more than the $5 that we paid for it.
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Ode to the Helmeted Guineafowl
Posted by daveb on October 6th, 2008
Oh, Guineafowl!
How beautiful thou art.
Thine spotted feather,
Upon plump bulk
And bright blue head
With red crown atop.
Why doest thou run, so?
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Cape Town: Paragliding from Signal Hill
Posted by daveb on October 3rd, 2008
In a homage to my dear friend Nathan, who recently and nastily twisted his foot back-to-front during a freak paragliding incident, H (Squiffy’s sister) and I decided that it would also be wise to throw ourselves off a mountain under a silk kite attached to our persons by means only of a few bits of string. Oh, and a man that looked like Elvis strapped to our backs. At the last minute, and unbelieveably, Squiffy agreed to go along with our stoopid plans and have a go too.
Unfortunately for my nerves, fattest goes last and so I was forced to observe the ladies; in particular their take-offs and landings to learn how best to mitigate a disaster for myself. Last time I landed under a silk canopy, I didn’t walk away and it took me over six months to walk without twinges of discomfort.
H went first and had the most perfect take-off, flight and soft landing. Unfortunately, I saw none of this myself as I was busy taking photographs of her experience. Anyway, I was heartened in the fact that she was able to walk unassisted back to us.
Squiffy was next and had a great take off and flight. The landing left quite a lot to be desired though, with the instructor misgauging her weight and dropped her on her bottom from about a metre with a definite thud in a bush, some way past the dropzone. Still, it could have been worse, the canopy and wiring landed in a prickly bush and I spent the best part of the next five minutes carefully unpicking and unravelling the wires from the thorns. H found it quite amusing at the care that I took during this task — after all it wasn’t her turn under that canopy next!
I donned my flying shell suit and slipped into my safety harness. The instructor and I had some tooing and froing with the harness; I wanted it tighter and he kept loosening it off as I’d be required to lean out of the straps mid-air to aid his turning ability. A bit scary, I thought.
The pilot instructed, “Now, you’re a lot heavier than the girls so the take-off is going to be more difficult. Whatever ever you do, just keep running until I tell you to stop. Even when we get to those those thorny bushes. Just keep running. Until I say.”
Grief! So off I ran towards the African inch-long thorn bushes knowing full well that the odds of ascending before impact were very low indeed. Worse still, a bus load of American tourists had recently arrived and now I had an audience to witness my death by a thousand cuts.
Good fortune come to those who persevere and a gust of wind hit us backwards a metre before the pain-plants and my pilot was able to convert this into an upwards jerk tall enough such that the evil spikes could only reach to the soles of my shoes. Hooray!
The mountain wall soon fell away and we were soaring about 400 metres (over 1,200 feet) above sea level looking down onto Cape Town, but never looking down on Table Mountain itself — that is over 1000 metres from sea level.
The landing, whilst quite fast, passed wthout too much drama in the end. I lost a little bit of my nerve on the approach and the crowd below could hear my pleas to the pilot, “slow, slow, slow, slow, Slow, SLOW!” as I flashed-back to my prior failed landing. I felt a slight twang in my ankles and heels, but this my have been more psychological than real.
At least I didn’t land in a bush.
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Cape Town: Robben Island tour
Posted by daveb on October 2nd, 2008
The multi-purpose Robben Island, a half-hour boat ride off the coast of Cape Town, is best remembered for hosting Nelson Mandela’s political incarceration during the aparteid era. The only way to get to the island was to join an well-oiled organised tourist machine which, judging by the glitzy mainland entrance building in the harbour, is doing very well for itself, thank-you-very-much.
In the first half of the tour, we were driven around the island on a bus formerly used to transport prisoners on the compound. (The photograph of the ‘pile of stones’ in the album below was symbolically started by Nelson Mandela upon returning to the island as a free man. Fellow ex-prisoners added a stone to the pile on their subsequent visits.) Afterwards we were lead around the prison wing when Nelson Mandela was held captive for eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment. This part of the tour should have been really interesting as it was lead by an ex-political prisoner who himself had done time on the island. Unfortunately, as with most African politicians that we’ve seen on TV, our guide was rather partial to raising his voice and in fact shouted his way through the entire tour such that almost nobody could understand what was being communicated.
Once back on the mainland, we spent the afternoon mooching around the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront shopping mall which was a very pleasant, if costly, experience. At last I managed to get a half-decent haircut within Africa by a very colourful character in Mr. Cobbs English Barbershop. Thank the lord that his workmate called him Jonanathan before I made the mistake of greeting him in the feminine form!
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Cape Town: Guest appearance, high tea
Posted by Squiffy on October 1st, 2008
Last December, my family joined us on our trip when they came out to Spain for Christmas. They’ve since had an open invite to join us wherever they wish, and my sister decided to make a guest appearance in Cape Town. She arrived a couple of days after us, and fortunately for her, a couple of days after the mammouth storms also. It’s lovely to see her and have her travel with us, especially as it means we get to stay in more upmarket hostels and guesthouses – Helen doesn’t do scum :o)
What she does do is cake. Get her on the subject and you may be listening for some time. So what better introduction to Cape Town than to have high tea at the grand Table Bay Hotel, where delicate sandwiches are followed by scones, jam and cream, and the last course is a delightful selection of around twenty plus fancy cakes and pastries. All accompanied by copious amounts of tea and live harp music. Dave and I had reserved the best table with the comfiest chairs, overlooking the bay and we had a luxurious afternoon catching up with Helen.
We left feeling stuffed and slightly disappointed that we hadn’t been able to eat more. Perhaps we should have asked our attentive waiter for a doggy-bag…
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Cape Town: First impressions
Posted by daveb on September 30th, 2008
Over my years in London, I’ve met many South African people (and even dated one) and ninety percent of them would rave above their country (the other ten percent were really relieved to be out of there!). In particular, Cape Town has been portrayed to me as the best place on the planet (Hi Tina!) and so I was particularly interested to see the place with my own eyes.
Mega-unfortunately, my first impressions here are anything other than good. Even before we crossed the border into the country, a really hard-nosed native gave an enormously unacceptable display of racial prejudice which I won’t write about here as I won’t give a person like that any lineage on my blog. Soon after crossing the border, it started to rain. And rain it did, for the remainder of the journey. Squiffy’s face fell. Our taxi driver shouted at us for the total duration of the ten minute transfer to our backpackers accommodation and handed over the shouting duties to the receptionist who continued until we could escape to have a cold shower in our cold room.
So far, I feel really let-down by the hype. We are not amused.
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Namibia: Learning some travel lessons
Posted by Squiffy on September 29th, 2008
Namibia definitely has some amazing scenery, novel adventure sports and touring the country in a 4×4 with roof tents has been a dream of mine ever since I saw it was possible at a travel show in London. I certainly had a lot of fun moments on our 12 day tour, but sadly I can’t rave about my dream trip as it was dampened by sharing the experience with ‘the wrong company’.
Only minutes after first meeting our female travel companion in Livingstone, she declared, “I hate Africa”. Perhaps this should have rung alarm bells with me, that this was not the girl to take a tour of Namibia with, but I thought perhaps she’d had one of those days where you can’t get anything done and you’re a bit tired of travel, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and told her things would get better. Unfortunately it wasn’t a one-off grump and I’ve learnt to trust my instincts about people. We’ve also learnt that we shouldn’t pay in advance for a trip if we’re travelling with other people. It makes it hard to escape :o)
Despite everything I’m very happy to have fulfilled one of the Top 10 travel experiences on my list and my Namibia highlights were; running down Dune 45 and falling over, seeing zebras really close plus a giraffe drinking in Etosha National Park, land yachting and sand boarding in Swakopmund. It’s definitely a cool country.
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Windhoek to Cape Town: Intercape coach trip
Posted by daveb on September 26th, 2008
After self-driving Etosha National Park, we returned to Windhoek and waved goodbye to our Nambian 4×4 camping car and boarded the Intercape coach to embark upon the twenty hour journey to Cape Town, South Africa. This was hardly the hard travel to which we had become accustomed in Africa. The Intercape Sleepliner is the biggest, most luxurious road-transport that I’ve ever used. Alright, it’s not a patch on the Rotel but, hey, we’re not in Argentina yet!
After claiming that I seldom sleep on upright seats in coaches and aeroplanes, I’m pleased to report that I slept thirteen of the twenty hours; much to the annoyance of a red-eyed Squifter who was less able to rest.
Having said that, having to queue up in the cold with a hundred other people to get through the Namibia/South Africa border crossing at 3:30am in the rain was a rude interruption to my peaceful slumber and wasn’t too much fun either.
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Etosha National Park – Self drive Safari
Posted by daveb on September 25th, 2008
A self-drive safari in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia demonstrated to us how demanding being a professional safari driver/guide must be and, whilst we love our 4×4 camping car, the value of riding in a customised safari vehicle with raising roof for the panoramic experience.
Aside from lions, which we only spotted from great distance, we had good luck wildlife-spotting at the park over our three days and managed to tick-off our outstanding sightings and essential experiences, including:
- Observing a rhino at close range — completing our ‘Big Five’ checklist.
- Being chased down the road by a lone male elephant. (Lone male elephants are dangerous as they’ve been disowned by the group for their bad-boy behaviour!)
- Having a zebra at arm’s length smile at us.
- Watching an elephant fight — apparently so rare, that even the professional safari guides were videoing the action!
- Giraffe drinking from a watering-hole — oh so cute.
This is our last scheduled wildlife safari in Africa, so we hope you enjoy the photos.
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