Two full days doesn’t do Cape Town and surrounds justice. But we gave it a go. The first day was mostly about geography. That got the walking and climbing out of the way as well as the almost vertical cable car trip up Table Mountain. The view from the bottom of the cable car was sensational and it just got better as we went up. Walking and climbing dispensed with, day two was all about wine. But first, a digression followed by day 1.
The first time we got in a lift in our hotel the power was cut. Their wind-mill must have stopped turning. The lift stopped abruptly and the lights went off. 20 or so seconds later the lights came on and we proceeded to our floor. It’s a bit of a shock but nothing like the shock of travelling up a mine shift at 30 mph. When the power cuts out here, momentum keeps the lift going up until gravity wins and it drops until the tension in the cables catapults the lift back up and so on, up and down in ever decreasing iterations until physics wins and you eventually stop. Unclenching then proceeds. When this happens, don’t be in the lower level of a two level lift with 90 people above you. Who says it doesn’t shower underground?
Back to geography. The Cape of Good Hope (nee Cape of Storms) is the point everyone knows about, well anyone who can read and occasionally exercises that skill. It’s the most south-west point on the African continent and there’s a sign to prove it. In other words it’s not the furthest south and it’s not the furthest west which doesn’t seem like anything to be particularly proud of. And Cape Point, a few kilometres from the Cape of Good Hope is not the place where the Atlantic Ocean officially meets the Indian Ocean. That’s a hundred or so kilometres away. But it is the place where the Atlantic Ocean current meets the Indian Ocean current. I know, I was confused too. But I was able to exhibit my encyclopaedic knowledge of primary school social studies when the guide quizzed us. Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco da Gama (explorer and bastard extrordinairre) and Emmanual the 1st anyone? And that last one isn’t the first movie in a soft porn series. Actually, maybe it is.
The wine areas are spectacular, even through the bottom of a glass and after four wineries, the eyes were getting somewhat glassy, like peeholes in the snow as my Mum used to say. But only if you swallow rather than spit. Unfortunately only one made port and it was the first so at the end we only had one bottle for balcony night-caps. The booze is free on these boats so no real damage.
We only had a handful of tour companions both days. In the short time we’re BFF’s only to never see each other again, some put themselves forward as worth writing about. Two American gay guys, one a genetics academic, the other a human rights lawyer with the ACLU were an interesting pair. I could have got into so much trouble just by asking a few questions so confined myself to asking the genetics guy how he reconciled X and Y chromosomes with numerous genders. He politely said it was a problem.
It’s been hard to reconcile the murder capital of Africa reputation Cape Town apparently has with what we saw and did. I guess we stuck to the well-worn tourist trails and CapeTown is a tourist magnet. To be sure we got off to a molestation-free start I booked a car from the airport to our hotel with an outfit that operates in many international airports. The driver warned us about checking child-locks in Ubers. That settled that. No Ubers.
We’re now underway on the cruise and what’s the first thing I read when we got to our “state room” (Azamara doesn’t have “cabins”)? Visa’s will be arranged at every stop provided you don’t have yellow fever and can prove it. FFS! After all of the aggravation I went through trying to do the right thing, the lazy pricks who did nothing expecting it would be done for them, were right. I better not give out this web address to any of our fellow cruisers while on board. We wouldn’t want them to think I’m putting them in that category. And I’ll be politely enquiring of Azamara why they ignored my two emails on the subject.