We set off on a beautiful sunny morning yesterday with a view to visiting Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope which we can see on a very clear day from Somerset West, our home base for this stay. As the crow flies, it would be a comparatively short journey across False Bay but by car, it's a completely different matter! In fact, it can be quite a marathon depending whether you are lucky with the traffic or not. On the outbound journey yesterday we were lucky.
Heading down to the Cape from Somerset West, you branch off the N2 onto the R310 which curves all the way around False Bay taking in Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, Fish Hoek and Simon's Town. However, before reaching any of these seaside resorts you glimpse the enormity of the townships of Khayelitsha and Mitchell's Plain on your right as you travel down the coastal road. The scale and size is staggering in the extreme. It is hard to believe that these townships, created by the Apartheid government in the early 1970s, hold almost half a million inhabitants and today in 2016 they have not been fully replaced with proper housing. There have been major improvements in the few years we have been visiting but quite frankly, the surface hasn't even been scratched!
The coastal towns with the exception of Simon's Town remind you a touch of Scarborough but with blue skies. They also again remind you of some of the other problems as we spied a large number of vagrants much the worse for wear through alcohol or drugs.
All that aside, Simon's Town is a great place to stop - it's the home base for the South African navy - and has great coffee and excellent fish and chips. It also has some delightful architecture stemming back to the late 1800s. Just outside the town is one of South Africa's major attractions, Boulders Beach, which houses a colony of African penguins, also known as Jackass penguins. They don't half attract vast numbers of tourists - from what we could see, most of them being from the Far East.
And so onto Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope where many people believe the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet and contribute to the micro climate of Cape Town. Wrong! The southern most point of Africa lies to the East at Cape Agulhas and the two oceans actually collide midway between this and Cape Point, creating incredibly dangerous seas and currents which have brought disaster to much shipping over the years.
It's easy to overdo the superlatives but it is a spectacular piece of coast and easy to understand the attraction to visitors. We were lucky to see it in great weather as at one point those old orographic clouds started to roll in and we feared the worst but as we headed to the very top of Cape Point on the Flying Dutchman Funicular, the clouds parted and the sun reappeared to allow me to get some great photos.
A slightly more informative post today but I have to end it on a lighter note with regard to those Far Eastern travellers who are providing much amusement to the four of us. In fact we probably spent more time on our trip yesterday watching them instead of penguins, warships, limestone outcrops or vagrants! They take hundreds of photos of each other, each one posed individually and we wonder what exactly they do with them all when they get home? They are covered from head to toe in clothes, many wear face masks and compliment their outfits with a sun parasol. Even their own parents couldn't identify them from the photos! I have included just one of a young lady in six inch heels balancing precariously on a rock. We so so wanted her to fall in but our prayers went unanswered.
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