Better late than never.. the first batch of our pictures from our FIRST arrival in Cape Town are up.. this covers everything before we left for the overland.
Hooray! We have arrived back in Cape Town and are spending many an hour in our favorite internet cafe, "Geek Internet" working on photos and forward planning for the next "leg" of our journey, among other body parts.
We drove in from Hermanus on Thursday and checked in at the Cape Town Backpackers. Heather played the honeymoon card again (she's good at that) and scored us a nice room for our final hostel accomodations in Africa. Its funny being back in a town that was so overwhelming the first time around, and so familiar the second time around. We managed to cram in so much when we arrived that we can afford time to relax and enjoy tasty restaurants and smile at the new arrivals asking "Where is Table Mountain?" and "Is the Robben Island Tour good?"
Overall the city is a little more understandable for us - its been hard to really understand what a massive disparity there is between white and black people, but how amazingly friendly and hopeful everyone is. The paradox was confusing but after a few week in-country we're starting to understand it a bit. While it is very very hard to make generalized statements about such a diverse country, the general mood does seem to be of hope for the future and happiness to be out of the aparthied regime.
As for us, we have a few things left that we want to see so we spent the morning at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens - a beautiful park on the outskirts of the city, where they have made an incredible effort to stock the place with every kind of plant imaginable. As the Cape already has one of the most diverse plant populations on the planet, this is a pretty impressive feat. The gardens were beautiful with flowers that looked like birds, and plants that you can make tea out of to ward off crocodiles and dogs. But mostly, it was just a really nice place to relax and play cards on the grass among a zillion children chasing each other, and the local wildlife, all over the place.
Tomorrow we're finally going to go on a Township Tour. We did visit Soweto in Johannesburg, but that was more of a historical and fact-filled tour than what they offer here. These tours are still the ones that Heather and I wonder about, the ones that sound a bit like visiting a zoo - "Look, here's where the shack dwellers buy beer!" But the only way to make that judgement call is to see it for yourself...