Sight-seeing with Cape Town Visitors

Recently we hosted two friends from the UK:

 Craig and Lewis loved Cape Town, and especially the Waterfront...
  
                                            
...which has a carnival atmosphere all year round, with buskers playing in many places and bands performing in the ampitheatre.

                                        
I chose these two photos because they both have 'cellos being played rather differently to when I played the 'cello many years ago!

                                         
A passer by kindly took this photo of the four of us, with Table mountain in the background.

This enormous copy of a space invader is constructed with drinks crates. It's actually the outside of a bar, which is open during the evenings.

 Nobel square, with statues of four South African Nobel Peace Prize winners, is also at the waterfront.

One Saturday we dropped Craig & Lewis at the waterfront for them to explore on their own.  They took the open top bus around the city:

 This reflection of them on the bus, I think is rather clever.

One of the places where passengers can disembark the bus is the cable car to travel up Table Mountain.

                                        
The old building on the Table top was once the cable car keeper's house, where his family stayed for months on end, now a gift shop.

You can even post your cards from the top of the mountain.

Another weekend we travelled out to Hermanus, the best land-based whale-watching place in the Western Cape. 

It's very hard to capture good photos of the whales with a small digital camera, but this one was about the best one taken, showing a mother with calves, in one of the bays.

Just to give an idea of the size of a fully grown Southern Right whale, which has no top dorsal fin, there is now a model on the sea front.

Another day they wanted to climb up Lion's Head, so we drove to Signal Hill to see if the weather was suitable for climbing. Sadly the mist had started to cover the mountain and it was quite windy, but they had a great view of Green Point Stadium, which was built for the World Cup in 2010.

As an alternative, we drove out to Hout Bay, a small fishing village, which comically has it's own passport. A few years ago the Mayor of Hout Bay tried to introduce the concept of Hout Bay being a separate republic to South Africa! Obviously the idea was never taken seriously, but someone did come up with a passport:  

 On an earlier visit with some friends, as a much travelled lady they decided I needed another passport to add to my collection!

On the beach at Hout Bay, Lewis enjoyed looking for shells, until a huge wave engulfed him.

Then as we travelled back into Cape Town along the coast road, it occured to us that the shape of the top of Lion's Head looked rather like one of the shells he had gathered. We stopped and had some fun, trying to place Lion's Head on Lewis' hand to show how similar it was. (You will have to use your imagination, but at the time it did look quite similar!)

Another day we took a very long drive up the west coast as far as Clanwilliam, in the cedarberg mountain range. Friends of ours have a small cottage there, so we were able to stay overnight. Sadly the weather was stormy, but we saw a beautiful rainbow over the dam:

 This area is the only place in the world where rooibos grows.  At this time of year it's a rather uninteresting-looking bush and we passed endless fields of it:

                                      
 We also visited the Rooibos factory, which is in Clanwilliam, where you can try the different teas and watch a video about its manufacture. There are so many rooibos products on the market now; drinks and foods, cometics and candles. It's caffeine-free and rich in anti-oxidants. They even make a green-rooibos tea, which is even healthier.

Unlike other teas, where only the leaves are harvested, the whole of the rooibos bush is gathered and dried to produce rooibos products.  I've been drinking rooibos tea since our first visit to Cape Town in 2006, and now Andy drinks it too. He really likes vanilla rooibos, so at the shop we bought several boxes of different flavours at half the supermarket prices.  We now wish we'd bought more, as our stocks are depleting fast.

The next day we continued our drive westward, from Clanwilliam to Lambert's Bay, and then turned south to follow the coast road all the way back into Cape Town. This took many hours, but we stopped regularly to explore the deserted beaches. Numerous smaller bays are dotted along this Southern Atlantic coastline. The boys left their mark in the sand - at least until the tide came in:

We really enjoyed travelling north, south, east and west, from our home, during the two weeks the boys were staying with us.  There's always something new to see in Cape Town - it's vast, and only a small corner of this enormous country of South Africa.