Cape Town report 4

Hello again,

Saturday: no diving, too windy (so said Barry, but I think he couldn't be arsed). So we had a pre-breakfast walk up table mountain instead via Patteklip Gorge. Rach moaned almost the whole way up (granted it was very steep - 2.5 hours of pure conduit road on foot-high steps), but we were both very happy when we got to the top as the views were pretty spectacular (see above), as was the greasy fry up. My desq leaving present watch gave us regular altitude updates, which I have to say was extremely useful, knowing that we were heading for 1000 m above sea level from 400. "Stop complaining, only 200m to go love...".

That evening we went to the Rugby to watch the Cape Town stormers beat the Aussie Waratahs. Absolutely fantastic. Great ground, great crowd, great entertainment. We didn't get to sample the pies this time as we had access to an executive box for free beers and posh nibbles at half time via William's extremely nice and generous friend Ivan Svart. We're thinking about going again on Sat to see the Brumbies, I'll get a pie-cam shot then.

Rach has been suffering with a bad shoulder, which got really bad yesterday, so we went to the doctors to get industrial strength pain killers and anti inflammatories. She seems much better today. After that we went to find a beach in a nature reserve William recommended. It was great - the most remote place i think I've been to in my life - 25 km away from a main road, competely deserted while we were there, warm water, lovely. Tortoises and ostriches were around, all very cute. Then a delicious Thai dinner for just over a tenner, incl. wine. Bargain!



Today we've been into the mad bustling centre of Cape Town, for a bit of sightseeing and shopping. We visited the District six museum, a document of one of apartheid's not-so-finest moments to say the least. District 6 is an area of central Cape Town, inhabited for a long time by a large part of the coloured population. in the 60's, the local council deemed it a 'white only' area, forced the locals to move out of their homes to townships on the outskirts, and then bulldozed the whole place. Never re-built, it is now a patch of wasteland, with a few churches dotted around which escaped the destruction.

The musuem has a large map of the area on the floor, on which the inhabitants have filled in their names in the appropriate places. It also has all the old street signs, which one of the demolishers secretly kept. It seems incredible that this happened in such recent history, and that the demolishing was only completed in the 80s. Definitely worth visiting.

We've also been around lots of markets, record shops, and have been successsfully shopping for an engagement ring.

Plans for the week: day trips wine tasting and to Cape Point.