Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Mmus4SGVGiFuua2v8
I wound up spending a bit longer in Cape Town than I anticipated – a little over two weeks in total. This was partially because I couldn’t find any road trip partners here…literally everyone in my hostel was a South African, which was awesome since I began to learn some Afrikaans slang, but a lot of them were in Cape Town to work on getting yachting certifications/short visits, so were not able to take time. The other cool thing I could have used, called Baz Bus, was only getting restarted on Dec 15. This is a bus service where you pay a one time fee of ~750 rand for unlimited hop on/hop offs as it drives down the coast of South Africa every day, so it’s like a cheaper way to do a road trip with unlimited pit stops. Overall, I definitely enjoyed Cape Town a lot more than last time. I think a part of it is adjustments on my side…Cape Town is not a traditional “sight seeing” city but more of a place to live and experience, so knowing that I was able to come in and enjoy it more.
I did three nice hikes in Cape Town which was cool, if anything just to get back into the hiking rhythm after all of my US roadtrips this past summer. Lion’s Head and Devil’s Peak were both pretty easy (only like ~700 meters in elevation), and gave cool views of the city. Challenging enough to still enjoy but nothing crazy, though Devil’s Peak was probably the tougher of the two (and way less crowded). The Table Mountain hike was surprisingly tough for me (~1k+ meter elevation), as I did it the Platteklip Gorge trail uphill in just under 90 minutes. Though I think the perception of it being tough was because I was with two guys who were legit phenomenal hikers, and their personal best for Platteklip Gorge was 40-45 minutes. The views up top were fantastic, and we got lucky that it was a crystal clear day with no clouds whatsoever. On the way back down, we went through the India Venster, which was a bit tricky at times. It’s recommended to do that trail uphill and not downhill since it involved a lot of straight vertical climbing, so going downhill on that was a fun little experience that involved a lot of twisting, turning, tight grips while figuring out where to place your feet, and lunge leans with your arms to go from side to side. It’s one of the only times where I have enjoyed the downhill part more than uphill – because it was a lot of vertical downhill, there was really no issue of knee/joint pressure that you get when going down switchbacks or steps.
Cape Town reminded me a ton of California – similar vibes, mountains for hiking just near the city, gorgeous beaches, and a not-so-slight issue with homelessness. It’s straight up one of the conventionally prettiest cities I have been to. I think the most scenic area is the walk from the V&A waterfront to Camps Bay, which is about a 2 hour walk down the shore, but you get some incredible views of the cove beaches with the towering mountains just behind it. It’s almost like what I would picture Hawaii to look like. I also had an “Africa” playlist on my phone to listen to on these long walks, and it was a lowkey racist/stereotype-based playlist primarily made up of the Lion King and Tarzan soundtracks, with a few Peter Gabriel (Biko, Across the River, In Your Eyes and especially Shaking the Tree are all fantastic songs) and Paul Simon tracks thrown in as well.
Another cool thing in Cape Town was the Zeist MOCAA museum, which is a modern art museum in the waterfront area. It’s only the second modern art museum I’ve been to in the past year, with the first being the Parkview Museum in Singapore last December (cannot believe it’s already been a year!). Though I did also see a few modern art/traditional art mixed exhibits in Chennai this past February/March which was nice. But I really do need to see more modern art stuff. I got major Burning Man vibes from the MOCAA museum, and this is gonna sound weird but it was basically like a physical form of the Beatles song Revolution 9. Just totally avant-garde stuff that somehow worked incredible together. The highlight of this museum for me was this floor that was actually filled with user submitted art that was done during lockdown. The curators divided these user submissions into multiple categories (time, connection, outdoors, etc.), and despite (or because) it was all amateur art, it was just so incredibly cool and well set up.
After a week hanging out in Cape Town, I did a road trip to the Cape Penninsula for a weekend with a friend from the hostel. He’s a Brazilian guy who has spent over half his life living in Mozambique and South Africa, so he was basically a local. He was also working remote so was unable to take a longer road trip across South Africa. Saw some pristine beaches along the western shore before making the famous Chapman Peak drive, which offered some scenic views. This was also my first ever time driving manual – the car rental for 3 days for a manual was 45 usd in total so 22.50 a person, while the cheapest auto was over 2x the cost. Stick shift is so unnecessarily difficult, and I kept on jerking around when starting and stopping the car. If I ever do a solo car trip I will definitely be ponying up for the automatic since it’s just infinitely easier to drive with that.
We ended our 1st day of the weekend by ending at Muizenberg beach. This is a peak case of insta vs reality, since those picturesque colorful beach houses sort of look eh in person but fantastic in photo. Soon after I snapped my one obligatory photo there, a little kid (couldn’t be more than 5) promptly walked by one of the houses, dropped his pants and took a public shit. That night, we went to a few local bars and wound up getting invited to a local’s place for an afterparty, since the bars all closed at midnight. I think us both being foreigners (my friend still has a Brazilian accent) made us seem more “exotic” especially since there are basically no foreign tourists in South Africa right now despite the easy entry requirements. It was a cool party where I was able to put my Afrikaans slang to the test, to much success. We took our signal to leave around 3 or 4am when a bunch of people took some ketamine and started break dancing and battle rapping (#BurningMan).
The next day, we went down the eastern coast of the peninsula. A lot of the towns here sort of reminded me of New England with their whole nautical culture theme and seaside restaurant vibes. Boulder’s Beach was honestly pretty underwhelming – everyone goes crazy for the penguins there but it was most definitely not worth the 10 usd ticket that I paid to get in. After that we spent a few hours in the Cape of Good Hope, which was a pretty scenic hike (though I think Table Mountain was better both for views and definitely for difficulty…this was a super easy one). The coolest thing here was that we saw some whales waaaay out in the distance, and borrowed another guy’s binoculars to see them (even then it wasn’t too clear).
We ended the second day by driving up to Stellenbosch to our AirBnB. Went out that night to a couple of bars as it is a university town. Stellenbosch, moreso than the rest of the Cape Area, really gave me the feel of a place with pervasive low-key racism. South Africa is like 80% black and Stellenbosch is one of the best universities, yet all the bars were filled with only white people. I’d have some similar experiences in Cape Town later on as well.
We did a couple of wine tastings in some pretty scenic wine farms in Stellenbosch and the nearby town of Franschoek, before going over to a local braii (South African bbq). One of the kids staying at our hostel invited us to his family’s braii as they lived in the area. The food here was far and away the best I had in South Africa – none of that touristic game meat that I had been eating a lot of (ostrich, kudu, springbok, zebra…all pretty good but not great), but just incredibly tasty grilled chicken, lamb, beef, and a type of sausage called a Boerevors. Me being the old man that I am, I spent most of the time there talking to all the adults rather than the early 20-something kids who were present, and they kept refilling my glass with an unlimited supply of surprisingly good local white wines. It was an awesome local experience, and I think a key example of how all of my post-COVID travel has just seemed way more local both due to a lack of other foreigners and since the locals maybe are craving foreign contact after all of these lockdowns.
One cool little half day side trip I did after coming back from this weekend roadtrip was a trip up to Blouberg, which is a town just north of Cape Town. There’s a nice long quiet beach there and the entire walk down you get a fantastic panoramic view of the mountains behind Cape Town – Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, and Lion’s Head, from left to right. I didn’t have my camera on me and was only on my phone, so the picture of that does not quite do the view justice at all. The entire strip here in particular reminded me a bit of San Diego with all the seaside shacks. Cape Town has honestly really grown on me, it’s such a livable place. And there are a ton of Nando’s around – the manager at a local Nando’s recognized me after my 4th visit there. Really the only big negative is the occasional water crisis that they have here.
I then flew to Durban to scuba dive at Aliwal Shoal. Got the dive shop rec from the guy who certified me for my Open Water in Pondicherry last December, since he was a South African. Diving here was amazing, probably my favorite of the 3 spots I have dove in so far (Nusa Penida, Hurghada, and now Aliwal Shoal), if only because we got up close and personal with a ton of sharks. To be honest, Nusa Penida is probably still the best of the 3 in terms of volume and diversity of big sightings, and the Red Sea’s colors are unbeatable, but sharks trump all for me. Did 4 dives over 2 days here, and in each dive I would see 10+ ragged tooth sharks that would literally swim within inches of my face or my body. It was incredible…was definitely terrified at first but you get used to it. We also saw a ton of massive sea turtles (longer than humans) just flapping around and doing their thing. Some of the reefs we saw, especially on the deeper 30m dives, were also quite nice and colorful, though not quite as sprightly as Hurghada since visibility was “only” about 15 meters here. Another highlight was swimming through these super narrow coral tunnels, where I would sometimes get my equipment “stuck” and had to deftly manouver just to get through. Just floating through these tight tunnels with all these small colorful fish and coral all around you was a pretty unique experience. One other thing to note here was the incredibly rough boat ride to get to the dive sites. We boarded these surf dinghys from the beach to get into the sites in the ocean, and these were rough trips where we were all given life jackets and where half the divers were vomiting between dives due to the chopiness. But they do say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Unfortunately, my last two days of diving got cancelled due to high winds, and I was planning on renting a GoPro on one of these two days, so no shark pictures :(. Two things I decided to avoid (which I wouldn’t have been able to do because of the cancellations anyways) were the shark bait dive and the cage diving for Great Whites. Shark bait diving is when they dump food/oils that smell like food in the water to attract sharks so you can swim around them, while the cage diving is just snorkelling within a cage while they do similar things to attract Great White sharks. For me, a big chunk of the fun in wildlife is the lack of a guaranteed sighting…like how I looooved Ladakh even though we didn’t see a Snow Leopard, or (this is a very extreme example), my Kenya safari vs. going to the zoo. I feel like shark bait diving is a cheap way to see the black tip sharks, and considering that I got to literally swim with 10 foot long ragged tooth sharks in a regular dive, I don’t really see the point. Now for Great Whites, they’re literally twice the size so that would definitely have been cool, but I couldn’t justify paying 200 usd for that – it’s only snorkelling and not diving! – when a regular dive where I see sharks (plus turtles, manta rays, reefs, etc.) is 50 usd a pop.
After my diving in Aliwal Shoal, I got an cab up to Durban, which was about an hour away, to spend a couple of days in before flying back to Cape Town. Durban has a relatively large Indian population, and to be honest, more than anything, all the Indian food here made me really nostalgic for India. I honestly can’t wait for the vaccine to come out so I can go back to visit India – can’t really do it now since I wouldn’t be able to see any of my elderly relatives or even my younger ones, as they’re all in contact with other elderly relatives pretty regularly. There’s still a ton more that I would love to see there, it’s definitely far and away my favorite country to travel in. Durban itself was a nice city to spend a day or two in, but pretty generic and forgettable. I went to a bar my first night there to watch Leeds beat Everton, and befriended a bunch of Leeds fans that night who I wound up hanging out with for a bit the following day as well. Apparently Leeds have a decent following in South Africa because the former South African captain, Lucas Radebe, also captained Leeds in the late 90s/early 2000s.
I bummed around in Cape Town for one more week before flying to Windhoek, Namibia…going to be doing a week long camping trip there (went through a company by my hostel, they provide the transport, tents and sleeping bags, and 3 meals a day so seemed like a decent enough deal) to see the dunes, deserts, and canyons of the country. My last week in Cape Town was actually super fun. Befriended a couple of guys at the hostel who were getting certified to work on yachts, so I went out with them a bunch.
Apparently Cape Town has this thing called “first Thursdays” where the first Thursday of every month is a crazy bar night. Went out with about 20 yachters to a few bars that first Thurs of December, and of course it was all white people out there. At the last bar of the night, the cops came by around midnight and then I saw literally 10+ people complain about being pickpocketed within 5 minutes of the police arriving #ThisIsAfrica. I also got invited to another Braai dinner the following weekend by a couple I met at the bar that night. They were in their early 30s, and management consulting in SA apparently pays well enough for them to have a swanky nice house in central Cape Town. The food was not quite as good as the braii I was at in Stellenbosch, but it was still a fun night out. I also met some people at this braai/house party who were engineers in a science expedition in Antarctica! They spent 14(!!!) months there, came back, and of course are now management consultants. I actually went out with them and a few other people from that house party to a really cool beach bar the following day called Grand Africa Beach and Cafe. At this bar, of the 10 of us there, I was the only person who had not had a near death experience. The two guys who had been to Antarctica had some near-death experiences getting stranded in blizzards, while the others all had some sort of car jacking/gun point story from other areas of Africa…and there I was as the sheltered American tourist.
Honestly, I think that South Africa was by far the most hospitable country I have visited to date as a solo traveler. Haven’t been anywhere else where I’ve just met random people who will invite me to their house for BBQ dinners and parties. As I said before I definitely think some of this is COVID related where it’s cool to see foreigners, but as a whole the people here were awesome.
I didn’t do a safari while in South Africa…it’s weird, but my view on my Kenya safari is a lot like an Au Cheval cheeseburger or New York bagels. Those elite experiences have spoiled me and I don’t want to have a subpar copy elsewhere. I obviously could stay at a private reserve in South Africa and get an experience just as good as Kenya but that would cost an arm and a leg, and especially considering how much nicer my Kenya safari was than my self-drive South Africa one, I didn’t even consider a self-drive in Kruger this time. That said, I’m planning on going to Victoria Falls in Zambia after Namibia, and there’s not much to do in that area besides the falls themselves and a safari, so I might bite the bullet and do some wildelife viewing near the Falls. I also guess that I can’t really spend two months in Southern Africa and NOT do a safari.