Cape Town - at last!

Cape Town.  Finally.  After way too many years, I can’t believe I am finally here.  And it is as good as I thought it would be.

Getting here was easy.  Flights are always long and there isn’t anything you can do to change that.  The good part was no stopovers and the arrival procedure in Johannesburg ran smoothly.  Customs was so easy it really was a non event and rechecking baggage in to the domestic flight took all of 5 minutes.  Still, by the time I arrived in Cape Town, Jenny met me and we drove home I was quite zonked, having been up for 24 hours straight.  It’s one of those times when you feel like you’ve been to a wild party and then realise you’ve just spent 98% of the time sitting, eating the occasional meal at the completely wrong time.

We have been busy though, and have realised that we are running out of time to see & do everything on our list.  We’ve had brilliant sunshine, blue skies, coldish winds, rolling fog and heavy rain – and that’s all in one day.  Can’t complain about the variety!

We spent a morning down at Muizenberg, stopping off there to check out the colourful beach huts and kept an eye on the amazing bank of seriously dark clouds that were rolling in.  Further down the coast was Hawk Bay where we wandered through the town, checked out each fishing boat as it returned with their catch and in the time we were doing that it went from sunny, to blustery, cold and then wet with the cloudscape ever changing.  We had an amazing fish platter by the harbour area for lunch and then headed back into town for a coffee before driving back home.

We’ve also had a walk around the Bo Kaap (High Cape) Cape Malay Quarter with its colourful houses and really friendly residents.  Really, for them I would have thought it would get irritating to have a constant stream of camera touting tourists taking photos along each of the streets but apparently Jenny has spoken with quite a few and their response has been they think it’s great that people are interested.  Even the residents I spoke to while we were walking around were welcoming.

We’ve been down to the V&A Waterfront area, wandered through the shops and had dinner at one of the restaurants there.   Well, OK, we ate at the Belthazar Wine Bar, simply because this bar had 600 wines on the menu and over 200 different wines by the glass.  And no, we didn’t work our way through all of these.  The food menu by comparison was quite compact  -  the Beetroot & Butternut salad was just divine and of course the wine was superb.

On the subject of meals, last night we went to the most amazing place – The Pot Luck Club.  What a place!  It’s in the Old Biscuit Mill, an area that rivals Glebe or Camden Lock.  Dinner was to die for – cocktails, platters of the most mouth watering food, wine, more food – heaps better than Tetsuyas and a tiny fraction of the cost. 

I’ve already started to photograph a variety of signs, and just for you Leanne, another collection of “things we didn’t buy” much like we photographed in Florence & around Tuscany.

Yep - plastic shoes!  We had already seen all the versions of the "fashionable" (???) crocs, but then this shop had all plastic shoes!  So I have of course bought the purple dress ones below - they'll be great for climbing the dunes in Namibia.

This last image is of the Crate Coke Man at the V&A Waterfront - built, obviously, with empty coke crates and done for the Soccer World Cup which was in 2010.  Quite something and at least they left him sitting there!