A Day of Touring

It is Friday afternoon and I am sitting in the sun room of the Marine Hermanus hotel in Hermanus, SA, a seaside resort town. The ocean is just outside and whales are frolicking within sight. It is truly a wondrous thing. But more about that later. Time to bring you up to date.

Yesterday we were picked up at 8 AM by Steven, our capable guide, and began a intense day of sightseeing. First we went to Table Mountain and rode a cable car to the top. This was the largest cable car we have seen and holds 65 people at a time. The journey was short in this high-speed marvel. At the top of Table Mountain you can take in a 360 degree view of the Cape Town area by walking the perimeter of the mesa. Robben Island is visible from one side, as are the entire city of Cape Town and the various suburbs and bedroom communities that surround it. The rugged granite cliffs of the mountain itself lie below and the sea a vivid blue beyond. It is a wonderful vantage point from which to get your bearings and get an over-all panoramic view. We saw some small animals that looked like the marmots we have in Colorado, but Steven said they are called “dussies” or rock hydrax, a new one on me. The rocks were also teeming with various varieties of lizards, some as large as a foot long.

After that Steven drove us around Cape Town so that we could get the flavor of the city. His favorite neighborhood is called Bo Kaap where the row houses are each painted a different color. This dates back to the slave days, he said, when all the slaves looked alike to their owners, so the house were painted different colors to make identification easier.

We drove through the downtown and saw the East Indian Trading Company (simply called the Company) Gardens, the slave quarters and the auction block where each new batch of slaves would be sold once they arrived in the city. We saw the hospital where Christian Barnard performed his first heart transplant in 1967. Cape Town was also the home of Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy Englishman who lent his name to the Rhodes scholarships, one of which was bestowed on our Whitney to launch her artistic career. We ended our Cape Town tour with a visit to the Botanical Gardens, interesting for its some 9,000 different species of flowers and plants.

Leaving the Cape Town area, we drove an hour or so through the countryside and along the side of the road there was a sign that read “Baboons are dangerous. Do not feed or approach them.” Steven told us that there are twelve troops of baboons in that area, each with up to 28 members. That didn’t seem very many and we held little hope of seeing any. But sure enough, a few minutes later we encountered a large group of the ugly apes, frolicking, picking lice off of each other, and staring at the people who were parked along the side of the road. There were large males (at least the size of large male humans) as well as mothers with babies hanging onto them. Our day was made. Later we also saw ostriches up close and after that a herd of elands, athough they were pretty far away.

Our next destination was the famous Cape of Good Hope, or the Cape of Storms as it was called in the old days, and the southernmost tip of the African continent. We now know why it was called the Cape of Storms. The wind had picked up a little and the weather had changed from quite hot (probably low 90’s) to a little chilly. But undaunted we obtained our tickets, entered through the gate and proceeded up the walkway toward the small lighthouse which has stood as a beacon to seafarers for a few hundred years. The lighthouse was accessible beyond by a few hundred steep steps up and as we began the climb, the wind became stronger and stronger.

I’m not a big fan of wind. Tom says it’s because my hair will be messed up but that is not true. I could care less about my hair. I don’t like wind because it makes it impossible to enjoy your surroundings, dries out your eyes and is just generally unpleasant. I am not talking gentle seaside breezes here! As we climbed the stairs, it actually became difficult to stay upright and we had to hold onto the hand rail with both hands! The railing was only on one side of the steps but I hung on to it for dear life and as for those poor souls descending, it was just too bad.

I was ready to abandon this plan several times, but never one to wimp out, kept going until finally we were at the lighthouse. You can walk all the way around it which I suppose is the only way to REALLY see the southernmost tip of Africa. And I tried. I really did. But the wind was so strong that I literally could not take a step forward in either direction in order to get to the other side of the lighthouse! Extreme difficulty of walking mixed with abject fear of being blown like Dorothy right over the side of the railing finally won out and I ABANDONED THE PLAN! Don and Gwenna made it to the opposite side but Tom and I decided on the wiser course of descending immediately. It is such a helpless feeling to fear that you are going to blow away—maybe the first time in my life I ever really had that fear.

But anyway, we saw the Cape of Good Hope and we are still here to tell the tale.

Although a bit frazzled by that experience, there was yet another item on the day’s agenda—the jackass penguins. But Steven wisely told us that we would have lunch first, it now being about two o’clock. We had a lovely lunch on the deck of a touristy but nice restaurant overlooking the water, and afterwards, fortified with fish and wine, we walked down to the nearby point where a colony of the tuxedoed avians live, breed, molt and die. Steven said that they are the only wildlife that he can absolutely guarantee seeing since they have lived there as long as anyone can remember. I never did hear their donkey-like braying, but that is why they have their unusual name.

We still had a two hour drive to get to the next hotel, finally arriving around 6:00. After a brief rest we had dinner to celebrate Don and Gwenna’s anniversary and so ended a fun-filled, action-packed and frankly somewhat exhausting day.

Now I’m going to try to post this and then I’m going out on the verandah to watch the whales. More later.