At the end of February, I finally managed to get to Cape Town, a place I had been wanting to go since moving to Mozambique. I went with two friends from Mozambique (though they are both originally English and have since moved back) and we spent just over a week touring around. This blog post will be a photo dump of the first two days, when it was just me and Polly, before Becky arrived.
On our first day, we went with friends who live in Cape Town to Buffels Bay. Buffels Bay is in the Cape Point Nature Reserve, about two hours drive from where we were staying in central Cape Town. The beach is beautiful, full of rocky tide pools, and is overlooked by great hills which look perfect for running, hiking, or even mountain biking. The scenery reminded me a lot of that in Northern California, specifically places such as Muir Beach and Point Reyes.
A key difference to California: Buffels Bay was full of baboons.
Here’s our little camp - the gazebo took four of us and about 30 minutes to figure out… haha
The most beautiful clear tide pools.
See the little fish swimming over the starfish?
More of the underwater world.
The next day, we went to climb Lion’s Head. This is one of the many mountains in Cape Town, between Table Mountain and Signal Hill, which is also called Lion’s Rump. Ha. We climbed up the back of Table Mountain the day after this, and took the just-about-2-hour hike up Lion’s Head as a sundowner - we brought fresh squeezed mango and apple juice from a nearby cafe. The actual distance up Lion’s Head is not far, but the climb gets quite steep towards the end. It is 669 meters above sea level (2,194 feet).
At the base - our destination was the peak of this mountain.
Still early days in the hike (in fact about 5 minutes in).
A halfway view point.
And the other direction.
The hike included ladders and staples; this is where it started to get steeper. The long skinny trail in the background is where we started - about half way along it.
The views started getting really good from up here.
This is when the fog started to roll in - by the time we made it down, the top of the mountain was cloaked in fog, making us very glad we had timed the hike the way we did.
Where it started to get dicey - climbing up the staples and ladders.
Nearly there.
The view from the top!
