South Africa - Day 3 - Cape Town and Table Mountain

Sunday morning was supposed to start with us going up on one of the local mountains known as Table Mountain, which has a cable car system to carry people from the base to the top.  Unfortunately the winds were too high for them to run the cable car system.  So instead we headed out to some adjacent mountains known as Signal Hill and Lions Head.  The one shown here is the latter.  It's a favorite hiking spot for locals but unfortunately we didn't have a chance to find out how good it might be.

 From Signal Hill we could see the cloud covered Table Mountain where we were supposed to be.

Looking down from the other side we had a perfect view of the soccer stadium near our motel in Cape Town.  This was the stadium built when South Africa hosted the World Cup back in 2010.  We remember that World Cup from the Vuvuzela horns which blared constantly from the start of a match until the end.  We found it annoying to listen to, but locals absolutely love them.

Looking out at Table Mountain and Lions Head.

Leaving the mountains we went down into the older part of Cape Town.  It's well kept up and painted brightly.

Leaving that area we drove over to the District 6 area which has quite a history behind it.   Shown here is a ruble strewn field left behind from the apartheid regime when they couldn't get the "blacks" to move out of town and so they just bull dozed down all their houses.  It remains an area of major controversy as the current government has said that the original owners should be compensated for the land on which they had homes.  It's difficult (at best) to prove ownership of those homes and determining worth is also quite difficult because it sits adjacent to what is now a major university and the main downtown area.  As we've been finding out, nothing is easy in South African politics.

Some of the downtown wildlife of Cape Town.

Next we moved onto the Company Gardens which used to be Cape Town's main Gardens before they moved them out to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in 2013 as shown yesterday.  Still very pretty gardens.

A monument in the park to "the" John Rodes who politically was very controversial in Cape Town but obviously did a lot for education (e.g. Rodes scholarships).

A nice group of rose tree's.

Table Mountain in the background of the gardens.

Then we got lucky in the afternoon.  The clouds lifted and the wind died down and the cable cars were running up to Table Mountain.  Most of the rest of the tour people were doing an optional tour that Tina and I decided not to do so we hired a cab and took off to the mountain.  Here's a view of Cape Town from the base of the cable car structure.

And here's our cable car coming down to pick us up.

On the car and heading up to the top.

Almost to the top and looking over to the side.

A slightly different view of Cape Town from the very top of Table Mountain.

Small circle to the left is the soccer stadium I showed earlier in this post.

Looking down at part of the coast line we went around on our way to Cape Hope the day before.

The happy couple over looking Cape Town.

And just as an interesting (or perhaps sad) aside, the island out in the middle of the ocean here is Roben Island, the prison of Nelson Mendela for 18 years of his life.

There's a couple of video's I wanted to post, but the hotel's wifi system is telling me I'm almost out of bandwidth.  Until next time, goodbye from the mountains and coasts of beautiful SA.