One week Alone... what am I going to do???

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Well, here I am in Cape Town for one week on my own. I was a little worried when Marnie left…. What would I do, who would I hang out with??? But in the end I didn’t have to worry about that at all. Steph and Liz were staying in Cape Town for a week too and were more than willing to have me join them on their escapades.
I met Steph and Liz at the V&A Waterfront the next morning and we grabed the Hop-on-hop-off bus tour. It took us all around Capetown, past the District 6 museum and the Holocaust Museum, past the gold museum and other jewelry design shops and then up to Table mountain. I wish I had some photos of the view from the top, but I had left my camera at the hotel as I thought we were only meeting at the Waterfront to arrange tours for the coming days, I didn’t know that we were headed up to the mountain that morning- I will have to try to get copies of Liz’s photos…
The view from the top was pretty amazing. The ocean stretches farther than I thought I could see. I even mailed a post card home to Mom from the top of the mountain- I think I wrote the truth on it, I said I finally sent you a post card from Africa and I will probably be home before it arrives ( and I was). From Table Mountain we hopped back on the bus and toured through Camps Bay and along the coast back into the V&A Waterfront.
That night Liz, Steph, Josh, Ramona and I all went to a restaurant on Long Street where they serve brown shark. It was very nice and cozy and had some delicious shark. It was the first time I had shark, kind of like a denser tuna…. I would eat it again. We even ran into another one of our tour mates here. Peter from Canada was out for his last dinner before he headed home the next day.
The next morning Kim, Kevin and myself all piled into a cab and headed off to Century City, Cape Town’s version of Chinook Mall. It was great to finally be buying REAL clothes- I have to admit I was stickingout in Cape Town like a sore thumb, all my clothes were Earth-tone colours, wrinkle free material, and designed by “Safari’s Are Us” 😊 . I couldn’t blend in if my life depended on it. I managed to find a few shirts, some shorts and a pair of jeans. I was SO excited to go out for dinner that night in JEANS! I haven’t had a pair of jeans on in over two months… who knew I loved denim so much??
After shopping Kim and Kevin dropped me off at the V&A where I met up with Steph and Liz again and we headed over to Robben Island. Robben Island is the Alcatraz of South Africa, it is where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 year sentence. We boarded the ferry and headed out of Cape Town Harbour over some choppy seas to the Island. Once there we got on buses that toured us around the whole island, there is an actual village that lives, works, and goes to school on the island as well as a very large colony of penguins that you can see all over the place.
We were shown all the prison barracks, the light house- which, funny story, was installed to help stop ship wrecks on the Island, there had not been any reported ship wrecks but it was thought that it was a precautionary move to install the light house… the ship wrecks began to happen AFTER it was installed 😊. After the bus tour we were taken to the main prison and into the common cell where we were introduced to our new guide. Our guide happens to have been a political prisoner who spent time in jail with Nelson Mandela, was freed and chose to return to work at Robben Island. A lot of the tour guides of the actual prison are ex-prisoners… I thought it was rather strange that they would choose to come work at a place where they were held captive, beaten and mistreated. It was one of the best tours I have done.

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