Cape Town Day 4

Day 4 We had tried to arrange a tour to go to the Cape of Good Hope but they were all booked by the time we tried to book it. So I rented a car and roommate #1 did the driving. Roommate #2 decided to hang out and get more settled and make decisions for the rest of the week since me and roomate #1 was leaving the following day and she wanted to get her things organized and booked before they sell out. The drive from Cape Town to Cape of Good Hope is beautiful and its a good thing I wasn’t driving since I was too busy looking at all the pretty. There are a handful of adorable quaint villages along the coast line that made me want to explore more fully, but we didn’t have time. First stop was Bolder Beach, a subsection of Table Mountain National Park. It is a breeding area for the African Penguins. A few years back, there was a major oil spill in this area and wiped out a lot of the penguins. They are now endangered and South Africa is taking seriuos their responsibility to keep them safe. You can tell this area is in the process of development. There is beautiful boardwalk to the penguin colony that allows tourists to take tons of awesome photos without actually interfering with the penguins. I saw baby penguins and juvenile penguins and adult penguins. Penguins walking, penguins napping and penguins swimming. It is a great set up. They have artifical nesting sites that will help keep the eggs safer from predators. Fencing and boardwalks to keep a safety barrier between the penguins and humans. And they have a huge amount of personal to make sure everyone follows the rules.

After Bolder Beach we headed to the Cape of Good Hope. Again, we really needed half to a full day to do this park properly. But we drove around and took photos. Didn’t get any hiking in..although the few hiking trails we saw included massive amounts of stairs to get to the top of a point. We saw baboons, ostrich, mongroose, cape girdled lizards and a tiny tortoise. We did a number of the drives and headed back to Cape Town to pick up roommate #2 and head to Table Mountain. We had tried to do Table Mountain the day before but the line was incredible. There were a number of school groups and tour buses and it would have taken us hours just to get our tickets and get up the cablecar. We decided to try another time. We swing by the lodging and I ask the front desk attendant if the situation we ran into the day before was normal....he looked shocked and said 10-15 minutes is the norm. So we headed over and there was zero line. It was after 3pm at this point and I’m thinking that made a pretty nice difference too. Got our tickets, got up the cablecar and was immediately overwhelmed about how aweseom it was when we got up there. The view, the vegitation, the birds, the lizards, the flowers...I wasn’t expecting it to be much more than a view and a bunch of barren rock I was sooooo wrong. We spent a couple of hours exploring and came down around 5:30pm. On the way back to the lodging...my trusted roommate #1 driver swurved to miss a car that was making bad parking decisions and hit the curb. The sound of the tire popping was audible. We were 500 meters from the hostel and there was no parking were we were So we just limped back to the hostel and parked there, surely destroying the rim along the way. I tried to contact the car company as soon as we got back but they had closed. They were picking the car up in the morning and I guess they’ll figure that out. Still waiting for the charge to show up on my credit card...