Happy St-Jean Baptiste! I’m back in Cape Town, where the weather is cool and rainy. I hear it was a real scorcher back home today, so I hope everyone’s beating the heat.
The morning started off with a trip to Cango Caves. Frankly, I find cave tours rather boring; they’re all the same, pretty much, and there are only so many stalagmites you can see before they all look the same. Next, we stopped off at an ostrich farm, which was one of those horrible made-for-tourist experiences complete with chances to feed, pet or even ride the ostriches. It just seemed cruel to the birds and lame to the people, if you ask me. But I suppose everyone needs to make a living.
Other than that, it was mostly a driving day today. We made our way from Oudtshoorn to Cape Town via the ‘famous’ Route 62 (they even print souvenir t-shirts and keychains using the Route 66 graphics). Accompanied by some Paul Simon and some local tunes, we passed through a whole bunch of farming communities, and we went through Robertson, which is another famous wine area. The scenery along the way was beautiful, with rolling pink-tinged hills and scrubby desert brush for miles and miles. We stopped along the way at the rather infamous Ronnie’s Sex Shop, actually a pub / general store that is somewhat akin to Daly Waters Pub in Australia.in that it’s a middle-of-nowhere location where people sign the walls or leave signed scraps of clothing. Its only connection to sex is that someone, in a moment of clarity, added the word to Ronnie’s Shop’s sign in effort to attract more business. I suppose it worked.
We arrived back in Cape Town early evening. It started to rain somewhere around Worcester, and didn’t stop the entire way back. After dropping off Karina and Nadine in Stellenbosch, we headed back to Cape Town and I returned to my home-away-from-home hostel. I made myself some dinner, and spent the evening playing cards and chatting with the other residents, including a very drunk Aussie Dave (he’d done the wine tour today), an American girl who’s been living in Minsk, and two women from Ottawa who just finished a stint volunteering in Uganda. I have to say that out of all the places I’ve been, I’m meeting by far the most interesting travellers in South Africa so far. My story — Canadian, on vacation — is really boring in comparison.
I’ll be here in Cape Town until Wednesday. There are still several must-dos on my list, so I’ll see how many of them I get to before leaving.