Day 5: Cape Town

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Today was another day marred slightly by bad weather. I head out on the City Sightseeing bus around 9.30am and headed to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. It was wonderful, and you could easily spend a day or two there, but due to my desire to see other things, and mother nature's desire to rain, I moved on after an hour or so. While there though, I found the "King of Proteas", tne national flower of South Africa. Not only is it a nice flower, but the views from where it is found are spectacular (photos of the view at a later date). There was also a touch and smell garden, and a useful plants garden, both which I though were very good ideas.

The next stop on the tour was the Imizamo Yethu township, which is Xhosa for "our struggle". It was really an eye opener. It is hard to believe pople actually live like this. People literally are living in tin shanties, hundreds of them serviced by a block of 4 overflowing toilets. It was really horrible to see people living like this. They actually encouraged me to take photos of them. They are not embarrassed about how they live, but they want people to sit up and take notice.

For lunch I headed to "The Republic of" Hout's Bay. The Republic was a publicity scheme that took off when two young blokes handed out fake passports to visitors. Evidently some pople took the idea of the republic to a new level. One person tried to travel to Europe on their "passport". A fisherman took his fleet of boats, made himself a navy and called himself Admiral. A third guy built a caslte on a hill and proclaimed himself govenor. Anyway, lunch was nice, I had a smoked salmon linguine and a macadamia creme brulee, both were fantastic.

From here we drove around the coast, past Camp's Bay, Clifton and Green Point, finally into the Waterfront, where we took a cruise through the canals. It was nice, but most of the canals are surrounded by mutli-million dollar apartments, so it is really a world away from most of Cape Town.

Finally, I ended up doing some washing. Boring, but necessary. Tomorrow I hope to finally do the Table Mountain abseil, or at least be able to go to the top of the mountain. Fingers crossed.

This may be the last blog for a while. I change hotels tomorrow and then begin my tour on Saturday morning, so I have no idea what my internet options will be from here on in.

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