South Africa

Happy New Year!

The best way to deal with London’s dark and wet winter is to go south, and Cape Town did not disappoint.

I’ll stick to the highlights. If you want more, please email me and I’ll go on and on. We were there for twelve days, and Paul made sure that we did something new each day. I’ll give them to you in order.

Day One: We flew from London to Johannesburg in the dark and without a window seat, but on our leg from Joburg to Cape Town, Paul was upgraded to a window in business class and gave it to me. I spent the entire flight looking out that window at my first glimpse of Africa. Joburg seems to go on forever with townships dissolving into mines and then into flat, red earth with only a few roads and one snaking river to break up the land. As we neared Cape Town, the landscaped changed to row after row of jagged mountains and deep valleys. Green crept into the landscape and the rock turned to grey and white. As we started our approach, I spotted Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned, and the steel blue of the Atlantic. We turned and Table Mountain entered my view, not from the angle of the photos I’ve seen, but recognizable. As we finished our turn, I spotted a wide curving shore, False Bay and the other side of the peninsula that begins with Cape Town and ends with Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. On that day, I would have called it the Indian Ocean, but I have since learned that Cape Agulhas is Africa’s southern most point and where the fish and plants that live in the water are more similar to the Indian than the Atlantic. Whatever body of water it is, the combination of oceans on either side and Table Mountain in between is a spectacular introduction to the city.