Cape Town

To put it simply Cape Town is just amazing! I've never been to a city and instantly liked it so much. The backdrop of Table Mountain is beautiful, drive just twenty minutes away from the centre and you are into vineyards, the beaches are great and it has everything you'd want from a modern city in terms of shops, restaurants etc. There is also so much to do here, over the past week I've been out doing some of the activities on offer and after a week I'm certainly not bored.

The obvious first activity (after taking a day off to get ripped by South Africans whilst watching the rugby defeat!) was to go up Table Mountain which we did on Sunday morning, we took the cable car up and the views are brilliant. The city is set around the mountain so as you walk around the top of the mountain you can see the different sides. The best view is towards the V+A waterfront where you can see the main part of the city and Robben Island in the distance.

The top of Table Mountain
A long way from home!

Most of the people from our overland truck were still around Cape Town for a few days so we organized a trip to the Cederberg Wine Region on Monday. The trip took us to four different vineyards where we got to sample somewhere between thirty and forty different wines, there's the option to spit the wine out after tasting but of course we weren't going to let it go to waste! I still know next to nothing about wine (and still hate most red wine), but it was good fun!

Cape Town is about 75km from Cape Point, the reason why Cape Town is so large as it was the cape which was most important for Europeans to round when sailing to Asia. There is a brilliant drive you can do to the cape which takes you along the penisula and down to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. Barry, one of the guys from the tour, is from Cape Town so gave us a brilliant guided tour of the different beaches and towns on the way down.

The Cape of Good Hope
Cape Point with my overlanding friends

I also toured Robben Island, another must do, which contains the prison where Mandela spent about 16 years of his sentence alongside other political prisoners from the apartheid era. The island acts as a sort of museum to make sure noone forgets what happened. The island tour traces the history of the island as a prison for the Dutch and British and then usage by the Nationalist government. In the prison itself we were given a guided tour by an ex-prisoner who spent 7 years there for recruiting for the military wing of the ANC, this gave it a personal touch when we were shown around the different wings and the actual cell where Mandela was. I was planning on finishing his autobiography by the time I went to the island, but have only managed to get halfway so far, its understandably very long!

Over the past couple of days I've been saying goodbye to the majority of people that I've spent the last 7 weeks which is always difficult but I'm starting to get very exited about seeing the rest of South Africa. I'll leave Cape Town on Sunday and head to Mossel Bay, the start of the Garden Route.

This afternoon though I'll head to the beach and the V+A Waterfront to try and make the most of the time I have left in this city, I'm coming back without a doubt!

Camps Bay, the nicest part of Cape Town with parts of Table Mountain in the background