September 18, 2025

September 18, 2025

Our hotel room has a view of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain. It is finally sunny and mostly clear of clouds. So after breakfast, we join our tour group and head across town and up the hillside. We pass the nearby Castle of Good Hope on the way. It marks where the original coastline stood before landfill. It was built by the Dutch to fortify this outpost after they muscled in on the Spice Trade displacing the Portuguese.

At the base of the hillside, we rode a rotating Cable Car to the top entering Table Mountain National Park. The sides of the flat topped mesa are very steep. It is cold at the top. Aimee and I walk a loop trail checking out the great vistas in every direction. We are so lucky to have clear skies finally.

The top is overgrown with strange looking plants. That is the reason the Cape Town area is the smallest of the six Floral Kingdoms of the world. Isolation in a colder region at the base of Africa allowed evolution to head in a unique direction.

Back down we drove over to nearby Signal Mountain for another view of the Cape Town area. On our return to the city we passed the colorful Bo Kaap neighborhood. This means ‘above the cape’ in Dutch (or Afrikaans). This once was the homes of the Malay slave laborers. When they got freedom, they celebrated by painting their houses with vibrant colors. This quarter is still half Muslim.

We had lunch back at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Aimee and I both had a seafood Chowder. Not quite as good as our New England version.

After lunch we boarded a very crowded ferry to Robben Island just off the coast. We get a good view of Cape Town on the 8-mile, hour-long passage.

Robben Island is a World Heritage Site with a long history of jail, military base, and leper colony. It became infamous when in 1960 it became the prison for activists in the anti-Apartheid movement. Its most famous resident was Nelson Mandela, who became the South African president after Apartheid was overthrown. After a bus tour of the island, we were given a tour of the last prison site by a former inmate. He was quite interesting, but saddened by his history now forgotten by young residents of South Africa. Forgetting a nation’s bad parts is probably a good thing for improving social cohesion.

It is late by the time we finally get back to Cape Town, so we head directly to the restaurant for our Welcome dinner. It was outstanding. Aimee and I both had the fish entree. For dessert I had a South African specialty of apricot-infused Malva Pudding.