Easter Weekend in Cape Town

So, on Good Friday, for the first time, we hit the road for real in the rental car.  The roads here are excellent and and the signage is quite good (although they don't have individual street signs).  With google maps we had no trouble finding our AirBnB in the Gardens section of Cape Town.  And what a great setup is was:  a 2 bedroom apartment on the 5th floor, with a balcony, and a secure parking space.  

The mountains which sit in the center of Cape Town--Table Mountain, Lion's Head and Signal Hill--are right outside the window and all around us.  This is Table Mountain, and if you look closely you can just make out the tram stations.

The neighborhood is lively.  There's a supermarket and liquor store across the street and about a dozen restaurants within a 1 block radius.  We settled in and had dinner at one of those restaurants and made our plans for the long weekend.

Friday was crazy windy, and Saturday was too.  We had a bucket list of sorts.  Table Mountain was high on the list, as was the Cape of Good Hope, but we knew the latter was problematic on Sunday due to the running of the Two Oceans ultra marathon on Sunday, which would close many of the roads to the southernmost point, and it wasn't clear that the Table Mountain tram would run in the Saturday winds, either.

So we hit the road for Cape Point, about a 2 hour drive, and we chose the counter-clockwise route, which took us over the hills and down to the Atlantic shore.  We took the famous Chapman's Peak Drive, which is everything everyone said it was. 

We stopped where we could for photos, and the wind played a big part:

We made our way down to Simon's Town and beyond, noting the local signage, and arrived at Cape Point in the early afternoon.  

Thus, we had arrived at the bottom of the Continent of Africa.

Now there's a bit of quibbling about this location.  The big draw at this national park is Cape Point, where there are two lighthouses, one high and one low, with houses from the old lightkeepers and paths and a funicular to go up and down to the higher light.  Cape Point is slightly south of the more famous Cape of Good Hope, seen here over Cheryl's left shoulder:

There's a walking trail to get over there, which is the Southwesternmost point in Africa.  Basically sea captains would spot the Cape of Good Hope and turn left.  It is less emphasized for tourists here.

They also like to say that this is where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, but there's an additional, more southern point on the continent, and that's Cape Agulhas.  It is a more remote spot, many kilometers east of this spot.  We didn't make it there.  I'm satisfied that we made it as far south as we did.

Anyway, we did a lot of walking and climbing at Cape Point in the midst of some really howling winds.

They've got some really dramatic trails on the side of some very high cliffs overlooking some beautiful beaches hundreds of feet below.

  They don't have handrails.

  

We were brave for a while, but finally decided to give ourselves a break and called it a day.

We made our way back and had our first ostrich sighting.

 

On our way back to Cape Town, we stopped at Boulder's Beach, just south of Simon's Town.

African penguins are one of a few species of penguin and they are local to here.  They can be found in many places but are thankfully protected in certain places, such as here.  They are great swimmers and fun to watch.

We made our way back on the winding, hilly roads in and around Cape Town.  We had dinner at Rick's Cafe American, wonderfully decorated and conveniently across the street from our lodging.  

The cuisine is Moroccan and they pretty much nail the theme with movie posters and the movie itself plays on a loop on a flat screen TV, with all the famous and fabulous lines showing on closed captioning.  Very familiar to us, and almost a complete mystery to Kelly.

The end of a very full day.