#01 Cape Town

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At 20:10 the plane left Zürich airport towards Frankfurt. From Frankfurt the plane took 11:45 to get to cape town and landed at 10:00 just on time. The pilot Stefan Knubel did a very well job on his last roundtrip before his retirement. During flight I had a nice seat neighbour to chat with. She told me the story of her three years stay in USA an her life in cape town, while I told her about chocolate, chees and the mountains of Switwerland plus my up coming trip in south africa (SA).
Just arrived at cape town airport I sneaked over the waiting taxi drivers, left the halls of the airport behind and headed towarts the bus station of mycity transport company, to find a map of the local public transport network and to experience the 15°C of the SA winter. After a while trying to match what I saw on the bus map and my google offline map on my smartphone a very friendly staff from the bus company came over and asked me where I'd like to go. I told him what I knew and ended up with a single trip bus ticked to get to cape town civic center. I paid 90 Rand (100 Rand = CHF 6.85) for a 20 min bus ride. With the same ticket I got an other connection which brought me next to the place I wanted to spend my first night in SA.
The 91 Loop Boutique Hostel is a very lovely and welcomeing place. The person at reception gave me recomendation where to eat and brought me to a shop just two doors further the street up, where I bought a SA SIM card. I got it for 150 Rent, 100 Rent for credit, 30 the card and 20 the service. While the service consisted mainly of trying card after card, till there was one which worked. However, the guy was very nice, explaining to me in detail how I can purchase data and monitor the balance et cetera. In the end I was very happy that the Internet came back down to my phone.
After this, the sketchy part of my day work sould follow. My plan was to travel by longdistance coatches. The opinions about the reliability and the security of this way to travel differ a bit. Especially the bus station at cape town has the reputation to be "very busy". I wanted to get a picture of this place and the people over there, before arriving with my luggage. So I went there by walking, what gave me a first impression of the city as well. Having my valuables close to me and trying to give a confident and determined impression I entered the bus station with a feeling comparable to being on a ghost train at the fun fear. In turned out that the ticket sales person was very nice, answered all my question and sold me finally a ticket to get to Wilderness for 500 Rent.
After that I went back to the hostel on a diffrent way and took a nap before reaching out for dinner.
I decided to go to a restaurant called "The Poke Co." located right next door of the hostel. The waitress was superfriendly. The dish I choose was: "SHROOMAMI" with umami mashrooms, a lot of diffrent vegetables and miso tahini dressin based on rice joined by a juice out of apples, pineapple, cucumber, kale, spinach, ginger, lemon & mint. - Just delicious!
After a short rest in my room I headed downstairs to the bar which is part of the hostel. I ordered a beer, had short game of table football which ended tracically for me and finally met two german brothers which decided to have dinner at this hostel. I learnd that one of them is part of a programm called the christian surfers. Hs is in SA since a few months, spendig as much time on the wave as possible and his brother csme here to visit him.
It just turned out that the galleryes at this corner of the city are open in the evening every last Thursday of the month. We where a little bit late but we made it to one. The art was very interesting for someon like me who doesn't understand much about it, but what i appreciated a lot was the sound the djane put. Absolutly rousing electronica which made me instendly dancing. - Very nice!
After the german brothers and me seperated I finished the day by getting a hot shower and then fell asleep shortly.

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