Cape Town, South Africa Apr 10th

Today we landed in Cape Town, South Africa. Our excursion today is to see as much as we can since we'll only have one day here.
We left for an hour and a half drive through the city and all the hotels, down town and shopping areas. There is a mountain range called the Table Top Mountains that is a horse shoe shaped range that shields the bay. We headed out to the Cape Peninsula and Cape Point. The Cape of Good Hope is the southwestern most point in the African continent.
We drove along the Atlantic seaboard to Camps bay and then toward Hout Bay. The drive is called the Chapman's Peak Drive because it winds high in mountain range overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and miles of beaches and granite rock shores below. The water is very blue.
We saw Baboons along the way. They are pesky, dig in the trash bins and are actually very strong and dangerous if you try to get close to them. We saw them from the bus, so that worked out OK.
Our first stop was the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve where we stopped for pictures and visited the lighthouse. To get up to the lighthouse we rode a funicular (vey steep train) to the top of the Cape Point cliff where the lighthouse was built to warn ships. There were great views of the lighthouse, cliffs, rocky seashore and blue water below.
Our next stop was the Boulders Beach African penguin colony. They are blue penguins native to Africa. Who knew??? We walked along the boardwalk and had up close views of all the penguins. They didn't seem to care at all that we were around.
We then had a scenic drive along the Boyes Drive road to Kalk Bay, Mutzenberg and False Bay. The landscape was more hilly and scattered with iron and granite boulders. It looked a lot like Big Bend Park in Texas and very different from the coastal mountain areas we passed through along the way out..
Our last stop was the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden for a walking tour with our guide. It has over 4,500 species of indigenous plants. It was nice to get out into nature today with all the sun, cool weather and fresh air. A nice change from the filtered, air conditioned air in the ship.
Then back to the ship to prepare for leaving. We were the last tour to arrive back since we had the longest tour of them all.Read more