More from Cape Town - Day 2

Greetings: Here's another installment. Photos are added, although they won't always match the text; keep checking as I'm adding them as I find time to format them, which has to be done after work back in the hotel room. These are my "girlie camera" shots -- Dan won't be working on his manly-man camera pictures until we get home.

Cape Town, Day 2
We were instructed to be ready to leave at 8:30, which we were, although we didn’t depart until 8:42. Seems Allenby's not as strict about time as he is about where you sit on the bus.

We drove to Cape Point, through areas that reminded me of Beverly Hills, and the canyons where I grew up. A touch of Malibu and a little Northern California coast. When we got to the National Park, we found zebra resting under a bush, saw some ostrich and Bontebok and were warned not to feed the baboons. Dan and I opted to walk to the lighthouse at the top. The inclines were fairly steep in places, there were also areas of stairs to climb, but the views were spectacular (and stopping for photographs lets you catch your breath). Only downside—at the top, everyone was smoking. I think most of the rest of our tour took the rail car to the top. Round trip was about 45 minutes, but 30 minutes a day on a recumbent bike isn’t the kind of workout that conditions you for hiking. We knew we’d feel it the next day.

From there, we drove around to the actual “Cape of Good Hope” where you could see all the tourists taking pictures of each other at the sign that said where they were. On the way, we saw a baboon that someone had fed an orange, and a Cape fur seal (not together). We also learned that unless Allenby sees them, they don’t count. While I’m sure there are numerous rocks that look like seals, I know what we saw.

We drove to Simon Town, a naval base, and had lunch at a seafood restaurant. Not bad, but the fish (parrotfish, we were told) was overcooked for my taste. From there, we walked to the Boulder penguin grounds and saw the colony of African penguins who seem to tolerate humans hovering above them on a boardwalk taking their pictures.

The drive home was slow due to traffic, but we did see some Southern right whales off the coast. Still jet-lagged, and tired from the hiking, we opted to sample the local beer at the hotel bar. We sampled the Castle lager and the Birkenhead. Halfway through the second, we decided bar food was good enough for dinner. From there, it was upstairs, a test of the large bathtub (yes, the water circles the drain in the other direction), and bed.



View of Cape Town from Table Mountain (yesterday's tour)

Lighthouse at Cape Point (we hiked up)

Signs in South Africa are very "proper". This one from the beach at Cape Point.