Since last e-mailing you all I've been doing the sights and
the local beer and wine. Giving it all the best of my attention especially the
latter.
On my first night here I got
pretty bladdered, the local "castle" beer is very nice and I'm pleased
to report that even after a dozen or more it continues to go down well. That was
my first night - Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman getting pissed in Capetown.
Needs a punchline.
Since then I've met some decent
folk including Fern who's a Malay Chinese, kiwi who will be joining me on the
truck as far as Harare. Monday Fern, Ken (Norwegian), Xexu (Basque) and I went
down to the cape to see the point where the two oceans (Indian and Atlantic)
collide. They actually form a whirlpool a few hundred metres from the cape of
good hope, rather odd. Saw
some African penguins, zebra,
ostriches, rock dassies, eland, seals, cool birds (the ornithological type) and
semi precious gems. Yesterday, went to Stellenbosch the seat of Afrikaans the
second oldest town in South Africa after Cape Town and a nice chilled university
town. More importantly it is also the main wine producing area. We (the same
group) went to the Blauwklippen vineyard for some tasting and I bought a few
bottles. We then went on to the Spier vineyard which was in a more picturesque
setting and we found that further down the estate there was beautiful landscaped
grounds and even some hand reared cheetahs. Very cool, unfortunately we couldn't
get in with them as they closed the enclosure five minutes previous. On our
return to the hostel (The Backpack), table mountain
looked gorgeous with it's table cloth on, a sheet of cloud. It resembled a 1000
metres of decapitated mountain with dry ice slowly trickling over the sides,
quite stunning. Today, Fern and I tried to get an audience with the Dalai Lama
as he was speaking at the parliament of world religions here in Cape Town but
were unsurprisingly unsuccessful. To make up for this we went to the aquarium on
the waterfront where they had some great displays of some of the ugliest
creatures on the planet. There were also the sharks and seals etc. but all of it
done in a very refreshing way. Including one woman with a microscope showing the
tiny sea organisms and talking about them. It really was interesting. Fondled
some anemones and that was about that, later today I am planning on going up the
mountain to see the sunset, it's supposed to be cool.
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