Jackass Penguins

This morning we woke up bright and early to catch a morning tour of the Cape Point area, where the Cape of Good Hope is. Cape Point is as far south as you can get on land in Africa and this also happens to be where the colder Atlantic and warmer Indian oceans converge. We were both pretty tired since we got back from the casino late last night and I know Pinot Gringo stayed up even later to write in her blog. The tour van picked us up from our hotel at and we got on and said hello to the 6 other European tourists onboard and the most boring guide you could ever imagine. She had a thick Dutch accent and drove like a maniac to get us back in time so that she could leave with a new set of passengers for her afternoon tour. (Stacey failed to mention in her previous blog that I despise bus/van tours ever since I took them in Costa Rica which is why I had her cancel her pre-arranged plans - you are basically a prisoner in a vehicle that is not comfortable, with a bunch of people you couldn't care less about, and they make every stop known to man to pick up and drop off passengers.)

Highlights of the Cape Point Tour:

• There are wild troops of baboons on the road to the Point, they are quite agressive when it comes to food and they are the only known primates that scavenge for seafood on the beach. Sorry guys, no good "Sanjay was attacked by wild baboons"story here - although we still have some safari left to go for this to happen.


• Cape Point. The view from here is spectacular! The point is actually on the top of a cliff so we took a funicular (basically an enclosed cable car on a steep slope) up and from there, you had a 360 degree. It was truly surreal to know that you are at the tip of a huge continent with nothing but ocean until you get to Antarctica.


• Boulders Beach. This beach is known for its colony of African penguins, also known as jackass penguins because they make donkey-like cries. They are very cute! It's so cool to see penguins in an environment like that - its like these guys are on spring break from the South Pole.

After our frenzied dash around the Cape, we asked to be dropped off at the District 6 museum instead of our hotel. (We also canceled our afternoon van tour throuh the wine country because there was no way we wanted to do another guided van tour; Stacey said she would have gone insane if we had gone on the tours she had planned the previous day.) District 6 is one of the most polarizing (and sad) stories about Apartheid. District 6 was an area of Capetown populated by blacks and coloured. In the 50s, laws were passed and the area was declared a whites-only neighborhood; the government forcibly evicted everyone and tore down their houses. The museum has a lot of personal artifacts and stories from the people that were forced out. It's quite humbling to hear what people have had to go through.

Afterwards, we took a cab from the museum to Table Mountain. Table Mountain is this great, flat-top mountain that is right in the heart of Capetown. We rode the Cable Way up to the top - a cable way is a round people mover that is pulled up by a single cable - it's actually quite frightening when you think about it. Anyways, we got up there and decided to do a 2 hour hike on the mountain. We had some spectacular views of Cape Town and the surrounding areas from up here. After we got back down the mountain, it was time for dinner so we decided to get one last western meal before heading off to the bush, so we got burgers and fries from this joint called the Royale Eatery. The food was just alright. I did have an ostrich burger that was topped with some kind of redbeet relish so when I took my first bite, all kinds of red juice started to pour out - it looked like I was eating a piece of raw, bloody meat.

After dinner, we got back to the hotel so that we could pack up for our departure from Capetown this morning at 5:30 a.m. Alas, it is time for us to move on to other parts of Africa, but Capetown is an amazing place and I would highly recommend it for anyone looking for a place to travel to. Now it's off to Zambia! (Sorry about the shortage of pics here - I'm having some problems uploading - I'll post more as soon as I can.)