Cape Town, South Africa

We arranged through the hotel for a car and driver to take us around the highlights of the Cape Peninsula. It was about the same cost as the three of us booking an excursion with a tour company, but this way we’d have full flexibility.

Our driver, Roger, suggested an early start at 8:15 to beat the crowds. It’s about an hour drive to the park gates, where we paid our entrance fees and continued on towards Cape Point.

Everyone stops at Cape Point to walk up to the lighthouse (there’s also a funicular but it was out of service today). Due to early hour, we had it mostly to ourselves. There’s nice views of the ocean and Cape of Good Hope. We could also see the boardwalk from Cape Point to Cape of Good Hope, which was our next activity.

It takes about 45 minutes to walk one way. Roger drove to the other side to pick us up. We saw some elands along the way. The boardwalk is in rough shape - some boards were broken in half, and most felt like a heavy step could snap them. But we survived.

We had lunch reservations at Two Oceans, which overlooks False Bay. Supposedly it’s where you can see the Atlantic Ocean and Southern Ocean meet, but in reality it’s just all blue water. (We had the same experience in Dominica trying to see where the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic meet). The lunch was pretty good, given that you’re really here for the views.

Next on the itinerary was Boulders Beach, home of a colony of African penguins. Unfortunately access was blocked because of overcrowding (too many tourists today!), so we had to skip it.

We cut across the peninsula back to the west side to drive along Chapman’ s Peak, a spectacular drive.

Roger then tried to find something else to fill the time (as we’d missed the penguins). We stopped for a coffee, and then drove through the popular beach communities around Camps Bay and Clifton. It was jam-packed today, and we crawled in traffic for about 90 minutes. I would have preferred to have skipped all of it and just got home early but oh well.

We pushed out our dinner reservations to 8pm cause we were still full from lunch . We ate at Manna Epicure, a French restaurant with snobby waitstaff and good food. Walked back home along the hip and busy Kloof St.