Back In Cape Town

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Back in Cape Town

Two Weeks and Nothing To Do!!

After three weeks overlanding I’m back in Cape Townfor a bit of rest and relaxation in the sun. After some really early starts (out of sleeping bag, tents packed, breakfast and truck loaded all before sunrise on some days) I think I’ll enjoy a couple of weeks of sleeping in a bed with no particular plan for the day ahead.

You Can Take The Girl Out of Sutton But….

My Sister, Helen, chose the apartment we are renting and she chose well. The only guidance she got from me when she was looking for somewhere to rent was that I needed somewhere with a washing machine after my overland trip!
We are staying in Devonshire Apartments on Main Road in Green Point. We have a seventh floor apartment with a balcony looking out to sea and overlooking the new football stadium built for the 2010 World Cup. We are a short walk from the lively Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. The apartment has been very well furnished and the owner, Leon, has paid a lot of attention to detail and provided lots of extras which you wouldn’t find in a large apartment-hotel. He’s been very helpful in helping us find some of the unusual places we are looking for and has even collected us all and delivered us back to the airport.
Amazingly, Leon’s wife, Enid, is from Sutton-in-Ashfield, the town I taught in for more than 20 years! Her accent is a strange mixture of South African and Sutton but she quickly reverts to Sutton when she starts speaking to me. She gives me a lift to the airport and time seems to fly as we talk about people we both may know, how Sutton has changed and “Lemmo”.

The Cape Town Stadium

The stadium looks to be finished and already a couple of matches have been played there. At the time of writing this, though, we have already failed twice to get inside and have a look around. From the balcony of our hotel we can watch the work being done on the main approaches to the stadium as gangs of workers improve the pavement below us on what I think is going to be the main pedestrian route to the stadium.
We see quite a lot of life from our balcony. Mick particularly likes watching the regular groups of people we see on Main Road below, from the gangs of workers during the day to the regular girls standing under the lampposts at night and to the boy racers who seem to come out on a Sunday night.

The South-Easter

The lively Victoria and Alfred Waterfront is a short walk from our apartment. This is Cape Town’s “docklands” area which, like so many other dockland areas, has been re-developed over the last 10 years with modern shopping malls, street entertainers, bars and restaurants. It is still also a working harbour with lots of working boats sharing the harbour with the expected pleasure trips. The area does seem to go fairly quiet at night. I think one reason for this could be the “South-Easter”, a wind that gusts in from the sea each evening. I don’t know if it’s an all-year-round thing but while we are here it’s like a wind-machine being switched on at exactly 7:30 each evening. On the night that we went down to the waterfront to eat the wind was so strong that we had to hang on to our plates and, more importantly, our beer glasses.
The sun is also very strong here. I’ve been travelling through other parts of Southern Africa where it is the rainy season at the moment, but here, even though we are getting to the end of summer, the sun is really strong. Even Mick has had to hide from it on some days.

Leaving

Our two weeks in Cape Town seemed to pass very quickly. Although we have been fairly busy and done quite a lot over the last two weeks we could easily fill another two weeks. I shall have a bit more time in Cape Town in about three weeks time and will be able to visit some of the areas of the Cape Peninsular that we’ve missed but I’m sure Helen and Mick would want to come again.
I’ve found the people here particularly friendly. I think they are very proud of the fact that the World Cup is coming here and want to show off their country and are very welcoming and friendly to visitors. Whenever we were standing with our map up-side down in the city centre some-one would come and help us out. Even the few beggars we met were not too pushy.
We learned to use and understand the buses and mini-buses quite quickly but we never managed to get across a pedestrian crossing before the green man turned red {I don’t think Usain Bolt could get across a crossing in Cape Town in the time that the light stays green! }.
I definitely want to come back!

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Photos

The View Of Signal Point And Lion Head From Table Mountain
With abseilers