Vasta poissa olen viimein perillä: Cape Town wonders

We woke up happy and excited to a Sunday in Cape Town. We had absolutely nothing to eat at the nice and cozy AirBnb of ours so the first task was to find brekkie. Not a difficult task since we ended up being in the very spot for all the cafes and restaurants! A fully vegan restaurant Happy Herbivore treated us with amazing avo-sandwiches and delicious smoothies. A great start to the day.

After the breakfast, when walking back to our place, an interesting incident happened: we saw some blinking lights some 100 meters ahead of us and...a car in a tree!? I mean, literally, the car was on top of a small broken tree. Curious creatures as we are, we walked past and figured out that there had been a car chase: police had been after the car and the driver had ended up driving into (or rather onto) a tree! Wow...

We decided to just take in the city by walking around. After a delicious lunch at Jason's Bakery, we walked to the waterfront to watch the beautiful old buildings and the whole tourist shebang. The first thing we noticed was that the people here were just SO NICE. Everyone was amazingly welcoming, courteous and helpful. So refreshing! What did break my heart a little though were the many beggars we met on the streets. They were hardly even asking for money, most were hoping for food. I ended up buying one of them a box of cereal (his choice ;) )...unfortunately I could never feed all of them.

All this walking took us back to our place for a little rest, and then it was time for a spontaneous trip to the Table mountain! We drove up to the cable car station, paid ourselves sick for the tickets and up we went to the top of this insanely flat piece of mountain that was always there looming behind the city wherever you went. The views were already great from the cable car itself and at the top you could clearly see the whole town.

The last car down would go at six and we had about 1,5 hours to do a round trip hike to the ”other end”, to Maclears Beacon which was the highest point of this flat top (1086m above sea level). It was about a 5 km thing but we decided to go anyway even if it felt a bit like rushing. I'm glad we did: it was a pretty hike away from the crowds and to some nice viewing spots. The Beacon itself wasn't super spectacular but especially the way back in the soft orange sunset light was fantastic. We saw the city and the coastline below us and marveled at the steep cliffs that went down for hundreds of meters just next to us.

At 17.45 we started hearing this noise that sounded like a war alarm was going off. It was the signal that the last cable cars were about to go down. We hurried a bit but for nothing really: there was still a humongous queue waiting for their turn so we had enough time to soak in the sunset views. AND suddenly the little fat rock dassies came out! These funny-looking creatures were like a mixture of marmot and small deer, their faces looked like they were constantly smiling and later we heard that they are the closest living relative to an elephant (how!? I do not know..) Dassies weren't very scared and we got to take some pictures too, check them out! It got extremely cold extremely quick and we were low on energy too so we headed out for some fantastic Ethiopian food after a short visit at home. Injera bread with plenty of Shiro and other beautiful sauces, yammee.

Next day we had a date in an excellent cafe at 7.00 in the morning with an old dear university colleague of mine, Laura, her tiny baby Jasper and her South African husband Anton. It was great to meet Laura again and of course get to know her family. They told us a lot about the current water crisis concerning Cape Town, gave us tips for our trip and we made a plan to meet again when we come back to the "Mother City".

After brekkie we took a short walk in a colorful part of town called Boo-Kaap, and then it was time for packing, shopping and all that jazz before heading out to Clanwilliam and Rocklands.