The Windy City

We spent 24 mostly uneventful hours getting from Bali to Cape Town.  The most remarkable thing about the flight was the number of people who remained on the plane, a 747, when we disembarked in Cape Town.  The flight was continuing to Buenos Aires and at least half of the people who had already done the 10 hour flight from Kuala Lampur to Johannesburg and the 2 hour flight from Jo’burg to Cape Town were now getting ready for a 12 hour flight to Buenos Aires.  I was glad not be be among them.

We picked up our car at the airport – me at the wheel and Ralph navigating, our usual roles.  I only got confused once about the driving on the left thing and that was in a traffic circle.  Fortunately, it was Sunday afternoon and the traffic was light.

We drove to Simon’s Town, a small town on the Cape south of Cape Town.  Normally it’s about a 40 minute drive but because of a huge bicycle race there were a lot of delays.  It took us about 2 hours.  One of the delays was the wind.  Drivers had to be very careful because the wind would blow cyclists into the road.  Take a good look at the picture.  There are whitecaps you wouldn’t believe on the water.  Someone told us that when the race started the wind was gusting to 70 kph (about 50 mph).

After we checked in at our B&B we looked around for a place to eat dinner, even though it was only 4 in the afternoon.   We ended up in a little seafood cafe on the Simon’s Town harbor, where fish and “chips” (aka French fries) and a salad the size of a walnut shell set us back about $5 each.  On the way back to the B&B we took a look at Simon’s Town’s most famous residents, who walk around in tuxedos all day.  Apparently the African penguin population dropped to a single breeding pair 20 or 30 years ago but there are 3-4000 now.  Pretty cute.  Back at the B&B, I was in bed by 7:15, well before the sun went down, and asleep by 7:16.