Our Travel Blog

Today’s plan was to head west to the Blue Mountains. The weather wasn’t as warm as yesterday and it was overcast. The forecast looked promising and the clouds were due give-way to some sun.

We headed down to breakfast, it was just warm enough to eat “al fresco’ so we had a repeat of yesterdays breakfast, but given the size of the sausages we cut down from 2 to 1.

Next off we made our way to Kings Cross station in search of an Opal card. The transport system here appears to be cashless with all transactions being conducted by tap cards. Surprisingly the transport company does not sell Opal cards, luckily the newsagents in the station did! One good thing about the system is that on Sunday the maximum amount debited from the cards balance is $2.70 Aus or $2.50 Cdn (aprrox. 25c US!!!) Considering it was to be a 2 hour trip each way this was fantastic value for money. Other days of the week the maximum amount debited is $15 which means you can use all the city buses and trains that you want and not spend more than $15. Pretty good value. Anyway that was the good news part.

The train was comfortable, but the track was all welded so no comforting clankedy-clank sounds as we traveled. The suburbs seemed to go on forever, but we finally broke out into the countryside and the hills, unfortunately the further west we went, the lower the cloud got. By the time we god to our destination at Katoomba we were well into the cloud. This was bad news as the plan was to take a bus and aerial tram tour around the area for its views. Given the visibility (or lack thereof) we decided not to splurge out on tickets, rather we walked around the town.

We also tried for our first Geocache of the trip, but we couldn’t it! Good news 1 Bad news 2!

We found a “bombed” tree at one of the churches, if you don’t know what a bombed tree is then e-Mail Lyn.

We stopped for lunch and as we looked out of the window we became convinced that the weather was not going to clear, so we made the decision to head back to Sydney. A disappointing trip, but at least it only cost us $2.70 each. You can’t win them all!!

Headed off for our final breakfast this morning. Lyn had done most of the packing last night, for some reason she wouldn’t let me help her! Last night for dinner we sampled some local meats, I had crocodile, Lyn had warthog ribs. Previously we had tried ostrich and gembok. We survived.

After leaving our bags at reception we took a taxi to the waterfront as we couldn’t be bothered to navigate the downtown traffic AND find somewhere to park! Our destination to day was Robben Island. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, some people say it’s a must do trip, others say don’t bother and yet others find it very emotional. The history of the island goes back many centuries and has been used variously for defence of Cape Town, a leper colony and more recently a prison for black, coloured and Asian male political prisoners. I had planned to describe it a little more, but it is one of those places I don’t think I could do justice to in a written description. You’ll have to come visit it yourself.

After we returned to the mainland we did some last minute shopping (Paul and Amanda, enjoy what little peace you can….. there may be very little after we meet the kids!!!).

We headed back to the hotel, the cab fare was 100 Rand on the outbound trip but the return trip was in rush hour and I saw the meter climbing quicker than my final 120 Rand liked. I told the driver I was running short on cash, but he said no problem we’d make it with change to spare…. He was right!

Having seen the traffic on the highway to the airport in the last few days we decide to leave in plenty of time, as it turned out we made good time after an initial delay where two highways converged.

We are now in the lounge with about an hour to go until we board, so this is just about the end of another great trip. We will be back? Yes we hope to be. Hopefully next time I do a better job of the planning and we get to do the train trip up to Victoria Falls. Despite all the overt signs of security e.g. wall, electric fences and guard dogs at many houses we always felt safe wherever we were. I believe as long as you apply a modicum of common sense, S. Africa is no more dangerous than many other places. So now you know!

The survey I mentioned yesterday is:

Where should we go next year?

A.   S. America

B.  European Riverboat Cruise

C.  Australian Gold Coast

I think I have the answer already but it would be interesting to here what you think.

That’s all for this trip, we’re off to Alabama again in the New Year, and another adventure next fall.

The weather seems to be slowly declining, dull and overcast this morning with the threat of rain. Cape Town is in desperate need of rain, the reservoirs are only at 25% of their normal level and getting lower. Water rationing is in force and shower times restricted to 1 (one) minute!

After breakfast we headed south towards the naval base of Simon’s Town which served as our marker for penguin country which is just south of there.

This area is home to the African Penguin, whose numbers have been decreasing rapidly over the last 100 years due mainly to pollution destroying their food chain.

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.

Below are a couple of pictures of Mum and two chicks.

The guy above is in the process of molting, this happens once a year and replaces all of the old feathers for new ones with better insulation. During this period, which lasts 21 days the penguins can’t enter the water so they go on an eating binge beforehand to store up their energy.

While wandering around the area we came across a colony of Rock Dassies and their young. Believe it or not these guys are related to the elephant family.

Youngsters

Mum feeding Babies.

After a coffee stop (again without Carrot Cake!), we headed back around the coast to Stellenbosch.

As we approached Stellenbosch we entered a huge area if vineyards, this is prime African wine country.

Stellenbosch is an old Dutch settlement where their architecture can still be seen.

It’s hard to explain, but the face in the picture above looked like a piece if rusted iron sculpture superimposed on a map of Africa. I couldn’t work out what it was meant to represent. As soon as I saw it through the viewfinder the face jumped out as clear as anything. Weird, but effective!

Lunch Spot

Although we had a couple of sprinkles of rain it was not enough to affect us, and certainly not enough to help with the drought.

Tomorrow our flight leaves at 21:20, so we are able to leave our bags at the hotel and we’ll get a taxi to the waterfront and catch the ferry across to Robbens Island. Depending on what time we get to the airport, and the state of their WiFi there may or may not be a blog tomorrow. I don’t intend to do a blog when we are in England as there will be nothing “touristy” going on. I will do a final entry in the next few days covering Robbens Island and maybe even a survey!

After breakfast we headed off to find the most Southern point in Africa. Many people think this is at the Cape of Good Hope, but it is actually further east along the coast at Cape Agulhas.

As it was a reasonably long journey we headed out of town on the highway with the intent on returning via the back roads if time permitted. We drove through a mountain pass about 1000ft above sea level into a fertile valley area where the was plenty of wheat, apples and grapes growing.

This fertile area carried on for a long time, we then left the freeway and headed south down to Cape Agulhas. We again stopped for coffee, but NO cake this time! We stopped a few times on the way for geocaches as I needed 5 more to reach 500. I managed to work it out so that the 500th find would be at the southernmost point of the continent.

Once we reached Cape Agulhas it was a bit of a mess as they are building a new road and building at the site. The road is being built of interlock paving, there were about six guys laying a gazillion interlock stones by hand, not a machine in sight!

When it came to finding the magic cache we thought a disaster had befallen us, we couldn’t find the cache! Luckily there was a log entry on the site that suggested if we looked from a slightly different direction then all would be revealed….. it was!

We planned a rout back across country via Hermanus which is a good whale watching area, on the way we passed the elusive ostrich.

The coastline at Hermanus:

This is the closest we got to seeing a whale:

You’ll have to read further to see what we didn’t expect to see!

Different place for breakfast this morning, at 2300 last night this place was heaving with students from the nearby Uni, this morning there was only us there!

Today’s plan was to drive up the coast north of the city to visit a few beaches and coves. In my mind I had built this trip up to be a coastal drive between small fishing villages; I was wrong on a couple of things, the coastal road had an inability to get near to the coast, and the small coves and fishing villages were obviously a figment of my imagination. Nevertheless, we did pass a nuclear power station.

The first few miles of the drive was spent in fog and low cloud, table mountain often disappeared  from sight.

We stopped at a small cafe for coffee and a piece of cake to sustain us, well the carrot cake was probably big enough to feed half of the town, needless to say there would be no lunch today! The cafe was quite funky with a lot of artsy stuff around as well as numerous birds.

After our somewhat oversized snack we diverted off the “coastal” road a few times to get down to the sea. Our first stop was Yzerfontein.

It looked as though they were preparing for some boat racing. The boats were inflatables like a Zodiac, but with a catamaran type hull and large engine. The could certainly move.

A cottage along the sea front

After leaving Yzerfontein we came across a sight we weren’t expecting.

These camels were just grazing at the side of the road. It appears they were introduced from N.Africa many decades ago and continue to live in the Cape area.

Next stop was Langebaan, a breezy seaside town with plenty of large rollers coming off the Atlantic (which by the way was no warmer today than yesterday) . Kite flying, kite surfing and paddle board surfing seemed to be the sport of the day.

We made a few stops for geocaches finding 4; this brought Lyn’s total up to 400 found — well done!

On the way home we spotted these two guys in a field, as usual we are looking to identify them.

Tomorrow we head off to the southernmost point of S. Africa.

Today was just one of those days! It started off OK with breakfast, the hotel has an odd way of doing breakfast; they have teamed up with three local restaurants and they give you a 100 Rand ($9 Cdn ~$7 US) voucher per person, believe me that is plenty for a full breakfast and coffee over here!

After a good breakfast we headed off to Table Mountain as their web site said the weather and visibility was good, and the line up was only 5 minutes. Well 2 out of three was not good enough, when we got there 30 minutes later the line up for the cable car was in excess of 2 hours (I suspect the web site still  said 5 minutes). We thought about waiting, but the temperature was climbing, the line was lengthening and as we had done the trip before we decided not to wait. Not a bitter disappointment, but it would have been nice to go again.

View of Table mountain and Cape Town from the base of the cable car:

Upper Cable Car Station

Cape Town

We headed off in the car to go to Lionshead, this is a mountain close by Table Mountain that climbs too 2195 ft, Table Mountain climbs to 3563 ft.

Lionshead

Moslim Mausoleum on Lionshead

From here we headed off to some beaches on the Atlantic coast, the plan being to see Clifton Beach, Llandudno Beach and Camps Bay. Well, it’s not the weekend, it’s not even summer but the places were mobbed, it was impossible to park anywhere with in walking distance at Clifton and Llandudno beaches so we had to make do with long distance views instead.

Clifton Beach

We headed back to Camps Bay hoping to get parked there, which we did.

Below is a view along the way.

And some views of Camps Bay

Looking Back at the top Station on Table Mountain

We spent some time on the rocks watching the surfers. We paddled in the Atlantic but it was FREEZING!!!

We headed back to the hotel via a Quilt / Hobby store, but true to form for the day, after spending 45 minutes in traffic jams we finally got to the store only to find it was in the process of being demolished!! Back to the hotel we went.

At the hotel we found a very apologetic note from management advising us that the the city was shutting off the water from 20:00 tonight until 10:00 tomorrow, there could be some very smelly people in Cape Town tomorrow morning.

The final bummer for the day came in the form of a text message from Avis saying that 3 days after I returned the car they found a problem with one of the tyres, and that they would bill me accordingly!!! I think not, there will be a battle over this.

On the plus side we got a few geocaches, Lyn has now found 399. We also had a great dinner just down the road from the hotel, maybe things will improve tomorrow?

Almost forgot, today’s Mystery Flower, any takers?