The New New Yorker: SA Part I

Look at this! A blog!

I am writing to you from our new home in New York City. It's at once great and strange being here. I like New York, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know it as a resident, but I miss London. A lot. It's like I broke up with a boyfriend and am now having second thoughts. Oh well, I'm sure my new boyfriend, NYC, will make me feel loved!

As per usual, I am behind on my travel blogging. But, there is no way I could let our holiday to South Africa (SA) go without permanent blog record, it was such a wonderful, magical, life altering trip. I will try to roll it all into words, but in order to do that I am having to break it into 4 separate blogs. So come back as I will try to get them all up in fairly rapid succession!

Part I - Cape Town

So our trip to South Africa was born out of a few different things. Back at my old job in Dallas, I worked for a man that has done a good bit of traveling, and actually has also lived in London. Several years ago, I remember one of my coworkers asking him out of all his worldwide travels, what is his favorite place he had ever been. His answer? South Africa. That has always stuck with me. When we moved to London and started getting to know people, one of the questions we always asked our new acquaintances was where is your favorite place to travel? On a big, long holiday, where do you like to go? Time and again we heard two places - Thailand and South Africa. Thailand and South Africa. On and on. When we realized that our time in London was going to be shorter than initially planed, our main goal was to make sure we had one good, long holiday before we left Europe. Because for as much traveling as we did last year, and believe me I know it was a lot, most of our trips weren't long ones. Up until SA, our longest trip was back home to Dallas in May. Which was wonderful, but not very exotic! When we started planning our last big trip, we first started looking at Thailand. It looks INCREDIBLE. I wish we were able to do both! We didn't decide against Thailand, it was more that we were just drawn to SA. So, it was decided - we were going to the southernmost point of the African continent. What an adventure it was!

We left London on December 14 and flew overnight to land in Cape Town. The journey is mostly a line south, Cape Town is only two hours ahead of London time and because of this when we landed we had almost no jet lag. What a luxury!

After we checked into our guest house (like a small hotel, fabulous!), we started touring around. Let me just say that we left London in the dead of winter and arrived in the beginning of the SA summer. With NO humidity. Never ending sunshine. Heaven. We bought tickets on one of those double-decker sight seeing buses, touristy and cheesy sure but it's such a great way to get a feel of any new city. It gave us great views of Cape Town's main attraction - Table Mountain:

Just the previous month, in November 2011, Table Mountain had been named one of the new Seven Wonders of the World! It is one of the oldest mountains on the planet - it's six times older than the Himalayas and five times older than the Rockies. To put this into perspective, Mount Everest in the Himalayas is 60 million years old. That makes Table Mountain about 360 million years old. Sorry, I've been in geology for too long not to find that fascinating! We toured up to the top of the mountain the second day, so more to come there.

My friend, Candice, who I met in London, is from SA and went to university close to Cape Town (we stayed in her "uni town" in the winelands - Part II!), and she said we had to check out Camps Bay! It's a trendy part of Cape Town with lots of bars, restaurants and clubs lining the white shores. Awesome for people watching.

Me standing on the beach in Camps Bay:

The Atlantic side of Table Mountain has a series of peaks and inlets called the Twelve Apostles which you can see from Camps Bay:

Looking back at Table Mountain from Camps Bay, you can see the phenomenon that is referred to as the "Tablecloth" - formed when a wind blows up the southeastern slope into colder air where the moisture condenses to form the cloth-like cloud. The local legend attributes this to a smoking contest between the Devil and and a local pirate called van Hunks (the Devil didn't just go down to Georgia, apparently he also went down to South Africa) - they must be smoking up a storm!

The tablecloth:

Me at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront:

Our first night we went to dinner in Constantia, a suburb of Cape Town and the beginnings of the winelands. It was a wine estate/hotel/spa called Constantia Uitsig and man was it beautiful! I wish we'd been able to spend a whole day just there! Here we are the first night before dinner, the vineyard in the background...

The veranda of the restaurant - Stephen is actually sitting up there in this picture, having a pre-dinner cocktail...

We proceeded to have one of the best meals of our lives. We must have had 4 or 5 courses with wine, and everything that came out we exclaimed over. And one of the best parts is the British Pound goes pretty far compared to the South African Rand, so it was a deal! The best way to enjoy a meal!

At the winery after dinner:

The next day I was a little travel-logged and Stephen had to pull me out of bed, we had to go explore Table Mountain so there was no time for sleeping in! It can be quite windy at the top of the mountain, and that combined with its sheer cliff drops can make for a dangerous combination. If there are clouds on the mountain or if winds exceed a certain speed, they shut down the mountain. It can be a little touch and go, but the day we went it was perfect weather so we had no problems at all. I was so glad because from the top you could see for miles. We took the cable car up and stepped out onto a perfectly flat mountain top. This is kind of a weird experience because every other mountain I've been on is, of course, jagged and angled.

Looking down on Camps Bay from the top:

Lion's Head peak:

Us at the top:

Look at how blue the water is!

The flat top of the mountain:

We spent several hours up there, hiking around and seeing everything. The views were just amazing. Stephen didn't like it though when I got too close to the edge of the mountain because 1) he's not too fond of heights and the sides drop straight down, and 2), I have a habit of falling down. On solid ground. Where there's no danger of disappearing off the side of a mountain. Falling near the actual side of a mountain would prove to be a bit worse and he said he hadn't sufficiently upped my life insurance.

I made it out alive though! No falling whatsoever!

In the background of this picture is Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years:

In this picture on the right, close to the water, is the World Cup stadium:

You can just make out the tiny dot going up the side of the mountain - this is the cable car which is actually pretty big and can hold up to 65 passengers and has a floor that rotates 360 degrees so you can see the view from every angle.

Back at our guest house/hotel...

Every morning, we ate breakfast out on the back patio of the guest house. It faced a pool and was surrounded by trees and lush leafy greens. There was always a cool breeze blowing - the perfect place for a nap in a hammock! Breakfast always started with the most unbelievably fresh fruit:

We rented a car for the whole of our trip in SA, and the first time we took it out was to drive from Cape Town out and all the way down the cape peninsula to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. On our way we stopped at Boulder's Beach which is near a penguin colony.

We didn't see the main penguin colony (you had to pay to see that), but we did see a bunch of them walking and swimming around. These penguins have only been in this area since 1982, and from just two original breeding pairs the colony has grown to over 3,000 penguins. Pretty amazing.

From there we drove to the two capes - Cape Point:

At the top where signs point to various cities - New York is 12,541 km away!

The Cape of Good Hope:

Driving back from the capes, we went through Chapman's Peak Drive, which is a pretty spectacular drive along the side of the mountain. It was originally carved out between 1915 and 1922 and at the time was considered a major feat of engineering. They've had some problems in the years since with rock slides and it has been reengineered.

A rockfall shelter on the road: