We're off!

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Goodbye Manchester, Hello Cape Town!

This one is the real deal, so to speak. We arrived in Cape Town after a flight which confirmed how different men and women are. While Lynne sobbed to PS. I love you, I enjoyed the braindead Transformers! Not to be recommended!

Cape Town was gloriously sunny as we checked in to the honeymoon suite of Cape Town Backpackers. It was actually really good. Nice and central and a great view from terrace of Table Mountain.

Eager to get in to a bit of site seeing we headed for Table Mountain. Thinking it wasn't too far to the cable car on the map we set off on foot and quickly realised we needed a cab as the sweat trickled down our foreheads! Luckily, minibuses are whizzing up and down all the time so we hopped into one of these and saved ourselves a heart attack.

Table Mountain is everything we expected and more. The cable car has a cool revolving floor, so you get to see all views on your way up and down. At the top, the view is superb whichever way you look. We tagged on to a free tour run by Cape Town volunteers. This was a great way to find out what we were looking at and the guide we had, called Udo was a really jolly type of fella. The "table cloth" as they call it (the cloud) was really impressive. There were also people abseiling from one of the cliff faces which didn't really take our fancy this time!

We then managed to get to Robben Island, to see where Mandela and many of the other apartheid prisoners were held. It was a pretty sobering experience, particularly the experience of Soubkwe. He was sentenced to 3 years for arranging protests against blacks being forced to carry pass books. After he'd served 3 years, the government changed the law so they could keep him on Robben Island indefinitely! We also visited the District 6 museum. This was an area of Cape Town that was designated as white only and the existing community was forcibly removed to townships 30-40km away. To top if off the cleared land was never really used afterwards! We heard from a former resident, who is 64 and hoping to move back to the area soon.

On lighter notes, the food and wine have been fantastic, particularly if you like value for money like me. We spent a great lazy afternoon in a place called Heritage Sq sipping wine on a Tuesday afternoon. I think I could probably get used to it.

Anyway, we've hired a nice new VW Polo. We were hoping for a Fiesta but alas it was not meant to be. That was about 5 days ago, so we'll get an update on here quickly. It took us about 3 hours to upload the pictures the first time but fingers crossed we're not as stupid this time!

Good to see Stoke whip Bristol on Saturday by the way!

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Photos

A room with a view
But to be honest the mountain is massive so if you don't have a view you must be staying somewhere really rubbish!

At the top of Table Mountain
With the Tablecloth in the background