Our Three-Week Adventure in South Africa #6
Exploring the Cape Peninsula
Anya Visser, the travel consultant with Pembury Tours who organized our trip, pre-arranged several outings for us over our 3-week stay in South Africa. Our first outing was a full-day auto tour of some highlights of the Cape Peninsula. Jacqui van Rensburg, a travel guide with a local Cape Town tour company (Wilro Cape Tours) was to be our driver and guide. Jacqui had also picked us up at the airport so we knew her. She picked us up right after breakfast and our first stop was Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens. With miles and miles of various trails there is no way we could do the Gardens justice, but the girls and I did do a short hike through some incredible vegetation and ended up at the Conservatory, a hot house displaying succulent plants indigenous to Southern Africa, where we met Mary Ann and Jacqui.
We next drove down the Cape Peninsula to Simonstown where we visited a penguin colony at Boulders Beach. Wooden boardwalks allow visitors to get quite close to masses of these small African penguins. From the viewing areas you can see the small, cave-like depressions in the sand where the penguins nestle and protect their eggs. With such a mass of penguins, one can see the full range from very small, feather-covered babies (actually looks like fur) to adults with molting adolescents in between.
Cape Point Lighthouse
Back in the van, we continued down the Peninsula heading toward the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point. These are the southern most points of the southwestern African continent. The southern most point of the continent is actually further east (105 miles from Cape Town) at Cape Agulhas. It is there that the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, not at Cape Point as many mistakenly assume. Despite that, however, it is quite a wonderful sight to be seen from the lookout (main lighthouse actually) high above the Atlantic Ocean. Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point Are at the southern most part of the Table Mountain Range that begins around Cape Town.
On the drive to the Flying Dutchman Funicular that would take us to the base of the lighthouse perch, we passed several different animals grazing. The most exciting of these were a number of Ostriches feeding alongside the roadway. First time any of us have seen ostriches so it was rather impressive. They’re much larger than I had expected. What we didn’t see were baboons though many signs along the road warned of them.
After our visit we headed back to Cape Town but stopped on the way for lunch in a little town called Noordhoek.
