touring Cape Town, SA

From the airport we had a two hour bus tour of the city.  We visited the Bo-Kaap section of the city, originally settled by the emancipated slaves in the 1830’s. It has very colorful small homes and neighborhood businesses. There is a lot of distinctive Victorian and Dutch architecture in the city. There were very high winds the first two days we were here so we could not take the cable car to the top of the famous table mountain but the cloud formations around it were spectacular.  We went up to signal hill which gave us a good view of the city.  On our last day in the city the winds died down and then we were able to take the cable car ride to the top for amazing views for miles.

On our first full day, we had a bus tour of the Cape of Good Hope which is part of the city.  The mountains are huge around the city and go straight down to the sea, so we rode on a very narrow road carved out of the mountains on the edge of the sea.

will deal with doing pictures correctly next time.

  Wherever there was a bay or break in the mountains, there were typical resort towns. The surf was too rough for swimming, but people were doing the other beach activities and there were places where you could go horseback riding on the beach.  We saw wild Antelope, baboons, and Ostrich.

We visited a colony of 1500 penguins and they were so cute.  Many were nesting while others were swimming and then waddling out of the sea and onto the beach.  We visited the most southwesterly point of the African continent.  It was very windy but we got beautiful surf pictures.  We had a unique private wine tasting at Steenberg Winery.  We finished with a funicular ride up to the …lighthouse and a great lobster dinner.