We’re back home after 16 days in Africa. Actually, there’s 30 min. until we land in San Francisco. Flying over Yosemite where there’s surprisingly much snow. We haven’t slept much – the plane from Johannesburg to Washington was very hot, and made it hard to relax. We had seats in row 69 – all the way back where the fuselage starts to get smaller. Smaller seats and lots of traffic but overall all it was good, and now United Airlines is taking really good care of us on the last leg from Washington.
We had a great time in Cape Town after a few hick-ups with the hotel in the very beginning. They took our advice of giving us two nights off for the various issues we encountered (there were ten issues on the list), so with the one night already free of charge we ended up paying for only four nights. We spent part of the savings on a helicopter ride around the city and all the way down to Cape Point. Well worth the money and it gave us extra appreciation of how the city and the landscape is connected.
Visited the District Six museum Tuesday and there’s not much else to say than it made us feel ashamed for what segregation and apartheid had brought to South Africa and Cape Town. We followed up with a trip to Robben Island where the guide who took us around had been a political prisoner. Much was centered around block B and Nelson Mandela’s cell, but there was so much to learn that we almost missed our connection back to the main land. Wouldn’t have been fun – the return ferry was the only one that day.
Thursday and Friday was spent with a tour guide from Ilios Travel – Ananda. On Thursday we visited everything we had flown over in the helicopter including the oh-so-cute African penguins at Boulder Beach, and a guy that for $1 would let you pet his pet seal… Spotted families of Ostrich around Cape of Good Hope – first time on the tour. Great lunch at the Two Oceans restaurant while watching the Indian and the Atlantic ocean mix. We continued Friday touring the wine country. The weather was fantastic and not much beats sitting outside eating lunch while deciding on which bottles to ship to California. Still, overall there’s no doubt that we would have preferred to spend more time in the wild and less in the city. Cape Town is lovely and we hope to go back some day, but it had steep competition with all the incredible sceneries and animals from the week before.
Moses is hopefully waiting at home. He managed to eat all the vitamin pills we had put aside for us for the trip, so he’s energy level was probably extra high.