Table Mountain and starting the Garden Route

 hi!

Our last stop in Cape Town was Table Mountain.  We checked the weather apps (also known as the Magic 8-Ball) for clear skies and grabbed some tickets for the cable car to the top.


It is a quick 5-minute ride to the top.  The floor of the cable car rotates so that everyone gets a view.  The top is 1,086 meters above sea-level (about 3,000 feet).

These are some of the views from the top.

We hiked around a bit, down a gorge and back up. The micro-climate was interesting because of the clouds/fog that sit on top of the mountain much of the time.  This moisture provides about 2/3 of the precipitation on top.

On Thursday morning we got our rental car and started PART 3 of the trip - the Garden Route.  This driving trip starts in Cape Town and finishes in Port Elizabeth (if you are following along on a map).  

Driving in South Africa is challenging in that they drive on the LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD and the driver sits on the RIGHT SIDE OF THE CAR!  The driver has the added challeng of not turning on the windshield wiper when signalling a turn.  It is funny at times.  It really takes all four of us to navigate!  One driver, one for directions, one for speed limit, one to say BIG-turn or SMALL-turn and stay LEFT!  Carsten and Falk both have done a fantastic job!  Some of the roads are challenging with many twists and turns, ups and downs.  Of course it does not help that our little Suzuki Ertiga has wheels about the size of our Little Red Flyer Wagon at home! LOL. Saving grace is that the car is an automatic!  Not too many of those around down here.  It makes things interesting more fun!

Our first stop was Boulder Beach.


At Boulder Beach lives a colony of African Penguins.  It was super windy when we were there so it seemed like they were all just standing around with their backs to the wind.




These two seemed quite friendly.

Once we had seen the penguins we left and drove on to Hermanus to see if we could find any whales.

Sievers Point, near Hermanus, is famous for whale watching.  You have to be patient but eventually you can get lucky and see Southern RIght Whales.  We saw several and they put on a show for us, breaching and blowing. We also encountered some Germans - but they are neither rare nor endangered .... LOL

This is the southern coast of Africa.


We continued driving to Cape Agulhas - google sometimes sends you on interesting routes - we ended up on a long dirt road - at one point we had to stop to wait for the shepherd to move his large herd of sheep off the road!  It was crazy beautiful countryside!

After a night at the Agulhas Country Lodge we went to see the area:

Cape Agulhas Lighthouse.


Here we stand here at the southernmost point in Africa - it is also the place where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean meet.


This is the Meisho Maru, a shipwreck off the southern coast of Africa.  It ran aground in 1982, all 17 crew swam to shore and survived.  

Once we had seen all there was to see at the coast we set off for George.  The scenery was beautiful, rolling hills, fields of grain, these weird trees that looked like they had grown a nice crown and were done - then decided to branch up further ... funky!



Back at the coast - oops.


We are now staying in an amazing AirBnB near George.  We will check out the area and report back in a day or two.

Cheers from the bottom of Africa!

Sheri & Carsten

PS - happy birthday to my momma - Roro!!!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philippines - Land Days

Image
We arrived in the Philippines after two bare-bones flights on Cebu Air. Anything over a paper cup of water cost money ... ugh.  We were pretty hungry by the time we got to Manila.  Some of you know that hungry Alsguths are not the most pleasant people!  We managed to avoid an international incident, but it was a close thing! Anyway, we woke up to a small problem, we had no Philippine Pesos (cash).  We had tried three different ATMs in Manila but had no luck.  Now we were at a hotel with no cash. We talked to the front desk when we checked in and they said they had an ATM.  This is what we found: Unplugged and un-helpful! I sent several panicked text messages to my "small gang" - they were super helpful.  Linda offered to wire us money, Joni said that it had sounded like an internet scam ... "I'm stuck in the Philippines and need you to send me cash!" LOL   We kept bugging the people at the desk, finally this nice lady changed $5 US for 250P.  This enabled us to
Read more

A minute about Kentucky

Image
Hello! After leaving Michigan we headed to Kentucky. Our plan: Mammoth Cave and Kentucky Bourbon! First up, Mammoth Cave. Long-time readers may recall our quick trip to MCNP in 2021. We did not have tickets for a tour so just did the short self-tour, getting a small look at this longest cave in the world. This time we planned ahead and bought tickets for the Extended Historical Tour. This tour took us deep into the cave, to Mammoth Dome, Fat-man's Misery, Tall-man's Agony and the Bottomless Pit. You can imagine, fat man was narrow and tall man short. It was fun! Many steps were needed to climb back out, over 500! One of our friends had recommended the Kentucky Bourbon trail.  We were so excited about this adventure we extended our trip to allow time for bourbon - without having to drive after the tastings. Heaven Hill (a large distillery) was our first stop. We saw their little museum, learned about the barrels that bourbon is put in and tasted five bourbons/whiskies.  The buil
Read more

Pre-departure Blog - Diving in the Far East

Image
 Hello! Everyone has that dream vacation in their head, the one that you have talked about and dreamed about for years saying, "we will do that when we retire".  On Sunday we leave on our "dream" vacation! I know, I know, we have been so many places and seen so many amazing things!  This is true and this vacation does not change that or diminish those trips in any way!  This trip is more about the "use it or lose it" philosophy.  It will be a long and physically demanding trip ... not one to be attempted in old-age.  [Whether we are in that category is a matter of what day it is and what we did the day before.... LOL.] Keep in mind that the POINT of this trip is DIVING.  We will actually not be doing much sight-seeing along the way.  We will have to come back to see this part of the world again ... and that certainly is in the long-range plan. Sunday we depart for Sydney.  The 17 hour flight will be the longest ever for me, and pretty close for Carsten. We
Read more