Cape of Good Hope

29 MAY 2023

Getting out and about from Cape Town is proving more difficult than I had imagined. The travelling is geared to the tourist trade and local transport is hard to navigate and find.

It seems that the best way to get any where is by organised tours or Uber taxis - not my usual style and one which will definitely impact on the number of people that I am able to meet with each day.

Today I took one of the City Sightseeing tours in order to visit the Cape of Good Hope (R495)- the most SW point of the African continent. This left at 10:00 from Long Street and was in a minibus with 17 other tourists from around the world. The driver and guide gave an interesting and quite humorous commentary as we travelled along. I appreciated this access to information and it helped to orientate me within this new country.

Boulder Beach

We stopped at Boulder Beach to see the colony of African penguins. I hadn't realised that there were penguins in Africa and that these particular ones were endangered. We were able to see them close up and view their young in nests and in clusters along the beach. I escaped from the group to get lunch in a lovely little local café, aptly called The Penguin.

Cape Point

Cape Point is in a National Park, an area covered in low shrub land. Today it was wild and windy giving a very appropriate impression of some of the conditions that sailors must have needed to navigate in the past. The climb to the large lighthouse on the top of the rocky outcrop was very blustery. Down below we could see the lower lighthouse, built more recently and to be more visible to ships from the sea. I decided to walk across the lower outcrop to the Cape of Good Hope. Here you can climb up onto the view point to see out west and up along the coast line to the north. It felt incredible to be at this point - a key navigation landmark on the trading route.