The Albatros
Tuesday 08 August 2023
After some much needed but still broken sleep due to jet lag, I awoke to find out our tourism plans for today had been scuttled. There is a taxi strike here which turned violent yesterday with buses torched and a couple of shootings. The taxi strike (These are actually the taxi-minibuses. These are how many staff arrive from the outskirts as they are basic and cheap and go where the larger buses do not) means that many places worked on skeleton staff. We were meant to travel to Robben Island to see where Mandela was imprisoned. It is literally the reason we stayed in Cape Town at all instead of heading to the country side as we have been here before, however instead we awoke to an email cancelling our tickets.
Nevermind, we headed out to find breakfast and scope out supermarkets as we hadn’t managed to gather supplies the night before. Some coffee and lovely eggs later, we could see the Table Mountain Cable Car was running and the early morning mist was clearing so we ditched the supermarket shopping and zoomed up to the Cable Car station. When we reached the top, the cloud was rolling in sheets over the mountaintop again and it was rather frosty. As we had not prepped, we only had polar fleeces, whereas a coat and warm hat would have been appreciated (along with water and a decent camera). Oh well, we did get occasional viewing patches and it was rather beautiful. We even spotted a few Rock Hyrax’s (Dassie), and we had more clothes than a few other couples who had shorts and T-Shirts.
Coming back, we found a supermarket full of pushy women with bobbed hair cuts who all drove very expensive cars who apparently found our presence very disturbing. I’d even showered and had a shave today. Anyway, we gathered some reasonable supplies and made our way home.
A seafood lunch at V&A harbour front was the next order of the day. A moderate failure there too as we ended up eating plates of African Wildlife (Eland, Springbok, Ostrich, Crocodile, Wart Hog and a couple of other tasty critters). We called it quits after lunch, we needed an afternoon to sort ourselves, wash our rancid travel clothes and reorganise our stuff into easier access for the road trip starting tomorrow. Oh, and to chill out and drink some wine after 48 hours of travel.
