Day 2 in Cape Town. I discover the City Tour buses.

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After a very intermittent night's sleep the wind was still howling. It's a South Easterly which apparently is renowned in Cape Town for occasionally being really strong and is the prevailing wind for the region. It really shook everything in the city but everyone seemed to be treating this as quite normal. Eventually throughout the day the wind started to subside. I decided to look for a tourist information office and quickly found one in the centre of the city. There I discovered that the best way to get around and have some guided sight seeing is on the open top double decker city tour buses. Just up the road from the tourist information was the main office of the company that runs the tour buses. I decided to go for a 2 day ticket covering the red, blue and yellow buses. These are hop on and off buses so you can get off whenever you want. I did the yellow bus first. This gives you a trip around the centre of the city pointing out places of interest. There are free headphones supplied with every trip and plug in sockets next to every seat. You can choose the language and the commentary seems to be particularly well synchronised to the location of the bus.

Next trip was the red route. This went via the cable car station on the slopes of cable mountain. Unfortunately because of the strong wind the cable car was closed which must happen quite regularly. Never the less, I still hopped off and went and sat with a drink in the viewing area to take in the sight off the city. Back on the bus we went past area 6, a very famous area of land Inthe apartheid years. 60,000 people used to live there in a totally mixed race community. It was a poor place but very peaceful. The apartheid government decided to evict every one of those 60 thousand people and destroy every home leaving only churches and schools. So many people who were appalled by this action that they refused to build on this site. Today this huge area is mainly grass land fairly close to the city centre. Later in the week as I was walking past the parliament building there was a huge demonstration involving thousands of people complaining about the possibility of the government selling off this land for a profit and not keeping it clear as they agreed to do all those years ago.

After I hopped back on the bus we continued round to the back of Table Mountain and went via a place called Camp Bay. This seemed a very posh and up market place to me. It was full of places that Di would have called 'classy glass' houses. In other words, very modern expensive houses with stainless steel and glass. I jumped off the bus at the beach front and walked onto the beautiful white sand, down to the crashing white waves and the amazing ultramarine blue of the sea. I walked along the beach for about 500 metres and then back along the palm lined seafront road. It seemed crazy not to stop at one of the very nice restaurants for some lunch. I picked a cable almost on the pavement with a perfect view of the beach and crashing waves between the 2 AC Cobras that were parked on the side of the road. For hire apparently. It was that sort of place. I spent a very happy couple of hours sitting having lunch, reading my book and watching the video and the 'beautiful people' walking by.

Back on the bus after a look in a few shops and deciding they were way too expensive for my budget, we travelled back along the coast road to Cape Town through many more beautiful and very expensive bays. This is obviously one of the ''places to live' if you don't want to live in the city. Eventually we ended up back at the Waterfront after passing the very ancient light house built by the Dutch East India company hundreds of years ago and then the new football stadium built for the 2010 world cup.

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