Cape Town Continues

The second weekend I was in Cape Town was a long weekend because Friday was Freedom Day, which commemorates the first post-apartheid elections that took place in 1994.  The following Tuesday was also a holiday for Workers' Day, the equivalent of Labor Day in the U.S. 

On Friday, Paul and I drove from the city down to Cape Point, stopping along the way in Simon's Town along the the shores of False Bay on the eastern side of the peninsula.  The highlight of Simon's Town is Boulder Beach where there is a colony of African penguins.  To protect the fragile animal population, people can't actually go on the beach itself, but instead have to remain on wooden boardwalks that skirt along the sides.  The most accessible parts were mobbed with other tourists, but luckily we were able to find a side path that led to a less crowded part of the beach. 

The penguins were funny and cute, especially the little babies who were nestled up under their mothers.  However, the funniest thing we saw actually happened after we left the beach.  As we set off to drive farther down the peninsula, we were checking out a nearby golf course when we suddenly saw a giant penguin just standing on the side of the road.  My first reaction was "Oh my God, look at the penguin," but unfortunately I didn't move quickly enough to get a photo.  The penguin was actually a guy dressed up in a costume who I guess stands along the side of the busy road to help usher stray (real-life) penguins safely across.  In retrospect we probably should have pulled over to get our photo with the oversized bird.

After leaving Simon's Town, we drove down to Cape Point, which supposedly marks the spot where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian Ocean.  However, this actually happens about 90 miles father to the southeast at Cape Agulhas.  Paul had promised me a great meeting of the oceans so in my mind I was picturing a monumental collision of two bodies of water rising to crash against each other (kind of the opposite of Moses' parting of the Red Sea.)  We even did a whole photo spread of me demonstrating my unfulfilled visual and aural expectations of the cacophonous scene.  In reality, it's of course nothing like that.  It just looks like any old ocean, though the view is still achingly beautiful.

When we first got into the park, we left the car at a viewpoint and went for a short walk down a trail amidst the multitude of fynbos and other vegetation.  As I was trying to walk farther out onto a point, I suddenly lost my footing and ended up on my back in the midst of all the fynbos.  I know that Paul would have loved nothing more than to get a photo of me sprawled with arms and legs akimbo, but I was so scared that I was going to slide off the edge headfirst that he finally deferred to just helping me back on my feet.  Unfortunately, we had to hunt through the vegetation for my cell phone and camera, which were quite well camouflaged for a while. 

Once we finally found them, we walked back to the car and drove to the base of the hillside with the lighthouse.  There is a funicular that takes people to the top, but it's only about a 20 minute walk so we hiked up instead.  Once there, I discovered that New York is 12,541 kilometers from Cape Town, the farthest of any other place listed on the sign, including Sydney, Australia.  From the lighthouse, we walked down another trail where we could better see a better view of the very end of the Cape Peninsula and alleged location of the oceanic collision.  After much disappointment and letdown at the anticlimactic vista, we walked back down the car and headed to Cape Town fighting the baboons and rain clouds threatening our way.  We stopped a few more times at different overlooks, ultimately driving through Camps Bay and Clifton on the way back to Seapoint.

The following day, I wanted to get new running shoes since the ones I had were falling apart so we went to a nearby outlet mall.  The place was jampacked and we had trouble finding parking.  After we finally got a spot, Paul and I both bought new pairs of sneakers.  Paul also bought a pair of sunglasses, which he promptly sat on and broke when we went to go have dinner at his aunt and uncle's house that night.  It's too bad I couldn't persuade him to get this pink pair because he might not have been so sad if those were the ones that got wrecked.

On Sunday, we took another short road trip out of town to the wine region just 45 minutes west of Cape Town.  We stopped first in Paarl where we went to the Afikaans Language Monument.  I was worried that I would get found out for my failure to speak the "native" language, but luckily since Paul speak Afrikaans, he was able to cover for me.  I could only smile and nod politely as he talked to a recently widowed old white lady and told her I was visiting from America.  The monument itself is just a tall, slightly phallic concave structure dedicated to preserving "Afrikaners identity and pride in their language.  Doesn't sound at all apartheidy to me.  Nope, not at all.

From Paarl we drove to Franssschoek (literally "French Corner") where we walked around the quaint little village that was settled 300 years ago by the French Hugenots.  We both had to use the bathroom so we paid to go into a small historical museum, which we then wandered around a bit before stopping at a garden featuring a Hugenot monument on the way back to the car.  Our next stop was Stellenbosch where we had planned to stop and eat a late lunch.  Unfortunately, by that point it was so late in the afternoon that Paul had to get back home for a meeting.  We ended up just stopping to grab something at a gas station to tide us over until dinner.

After conquering Lion's Head the first weekend I was in town, on Worker's Day we took on a new challenge: Table Mountain.  The mountain was clouded over in the morning so we first went downtown to see if there was a museum we could visit before hiking up in the afternoon.  Unfortunately, all the museums were closed for the holiday so we just wandered around for a bit before driving to the base of the mountain in the late morning.

There's a cable car that goes up to the top of Table Mountain, but of course we wanted to hike.  We took one of the easier trails, but it still was a bit of a steep climb.  It was sunny when we left, but started to cloud over a bit once we neared the top.  Along the way, I had the brilliant idea to film an iPhone movie with a very minimal plotline.  When we reached the top of the table the foggy conditions actually played well into the premise of our future Oscar-winning short, "Terror on the Tablecloth," which is currently still in the edit stage.  Luckily the clouds did part occasionally, giving us a decent view of the coastline and neighborhoods below.  Unfortunately, all the people who had cheated by taking the cable car up made for quite a crowded summit.  We did it the real way and even though our legs felt like jelly when we got to the bottom, the effort was definitely worth it.  We put the "work" in Workers' Day that afternoon.  We climbed a mountain AND made a film.