Cape Town Adventures - Part 2

We left off after a lovely, sunny day of wine tasting in South Africa. **Warning: lots of photos in this post**

Sunday morning, we woke up and decided to take a drive down to some of the "must-do" activities south of the city center. First, we went to Boulders Beach to check out the African penguin colony. You take a boardwalk out to the beach where they are just hanging out, waiting to be photographed. The beach is absolutely beautiful and the water is clear and turquoise. I have to say they picked a good place to call "home", though I was disappointed that none of them wanted to tap dance with me.

Insert unnecessarily large quantity of cute penguin photos here:

After my desires for penguin photos were fully satisfied, we got back in the car and drove down to the Cape of Good Hope. Now we will admit there is not much here. Arguably the highlight of the drive was seeing an ostrich just hanging out right after we entered the National Park. Unfortunately, we were driving and I didn't have the camera armed and ready because, well, I didn't expect to be surprised by two ostriches on the side of the road. We got to the park and walked up the path. Theres a full service restaurant and a pretty lighthouse there. The scenery is beautiful and it's definitely a check off on the bucket list. Searched heavily for our ostrich friends on the way out but they must've found someone else to surprise.

We drove back to the hotel, and had a quiet dinner there. Watched some TV in the room with the intention of taking a nap to wake up for the Super Bowl. Kickoff was at 1:30am local time. Dan managed to power through just fine. I watched pregame, fell asleep, woke up at halftime, and managed to get about 5 minutes into the third quarter before I was out. I woke up again to Dan closing the computer and managed to ask "who won?" before clonking out again. Yay, Super Bowl. (This is arguably the worst thing about living in Africa. American sports are supremely difficult to watch due to the time change.)

Monday was our last day in Cape Town. It was also the clearest and least windy. Off to Table Mountain we went. We took the aerial cableway and I actually did alright. The cars are round to limit wind resistance and the floor inside actually rotates so that everyone gets a chance to take pictures. Turning down Dan's request to hold his feet while he hung out to take photos, I stuck to the middle. The views are incredible though. The cars hold about 60 people and come every 4 minutes or so. We walked around quite a bit at the top and took pictures back down to the city. It really is a unique mountain.

View of Table Mountain from our hotel room

From the top looking back down at the city

Headed back to V&A Waterfront that evening. We had walked past a sign for a Lego exhibit called "The Art of the Brick". Dan grew up a HUGE Lego fan and I enjoyed them quite a bit myself, so we decided that we should check it out. The exhibit was fantastic. I thought Dan would be pumped but I was totally in awe of the artist's work. His name is Nathan Sawaya and I had seen him on Ellen so I recognized his piece on the promotional sign. He used to be a lawyer who worked with Legos in the evenings to decompress from his job. Eventually, he got commissioned to do some pieces and one thing led to another. He talked about how important art was to him as a kid and how he works with charities/schools to ensure that this is not taken away from today's youth. I bought a shirt that says "art is not optional". Having grown up as a dancer, enjoying making crafts and painting, it really spoke to me. After the exhibit, we had a nice seafood dinner and made our way back to pack up for our trip back to Maputo.

Here are some of the photos of Mr. Sawaya's Lego pieces:

Us hanging out with a man made of Legos

Yes, that's Edward Munch's "The Scream" made of Legos 

Dan in front of a Lego T-Rex skeleton (approx 80,000 Legos)

Our Long Weekend in Cape Town... Part 1

Mozambique has some pretty silly visa restrictions. While Dan's visa is valid for 180 days, and mine for 90 days (work visa vs. tourist visa), they have a rule that all foreigners must leave the country every 30 days. As we were quickly approaching our 30 day mark, we decided to start thinking about what we wanted to do since we had to leave anyway. We were informed that Tuesday, February 3rd was a national holiday in Mozambique... Women's Day (yay, women!). Dan's director said almost everyone will take Monday off and several people will leave early on Friday. Well alright then, we now have a long weekend and are required to leave the country. Let the location brainstorming begin!

I had mentioned wanting to do Cape Town for my 30th birthday in March but this just happened to work out well. Not terribly far and he wouldn't need to take a lot of time off work. So, early Friday morning we headed off to the Mother City. There is so much to do in Cape Town, it's difficult to narrow down what you can fit into your days. Many of the "must-do" tourist attractions are outside the city's limits so you must be prepared to either charter a car, do the touristy sightseeing bus or drive yourself from place to place.

We decided to rent the car and drive ourselves. Well, actually Dan did. Because Esquire Magazine told him that driving a stick shift on the left side of the road is something "every man should experience" (gee, thanks, Esquire). Let me just say that he did a fantastic job. Handled the shifter being on the left, and never once turned into the wrong side of the road. He was, however, outmatched by the turn signal being on the right hand side of the steering wheel. Every time he changed lanes, the windshield wipers would go off, followed by a small outburst of profanity. But he did it! Dan can now check that off his bucket list.

On Friday, we drove to our hotel. Originally, we planned to do the aerial cableway at Table Mountain but there were some clouds and wind at the top and I was worried about picture-taking conditions. And frankly, I'm afraid of heights so any reason to delay hanging from a cable was easily justifiable on my part. We got some lunch at a place nearby and headed to V&A (Victoria & Alfred) Waterfront. This are is the touristy area: tons of restaurants, bars, shops, a sizable shopping mall, a ferris wheel, a couple of hotels and all the docks for any excursions or tours that you may have booked like whale watching, or the trip to Robben Island (the prison where Nelson Mandela was for almost 20 years). We shopped and ate dinner there before heading back to the hotel to crash.

On Saturday, we had tickets to the Stellenbosch Wine Festival. Stellenbosch is one of the wine regions about an hour outside of Cape Town. Think Stellenbosch and Franschoek as similar to Napa and Sonoma. Since we knew we would be drinking, we hired a car to drive us over and back for surprisingly cheap. Despite having been to multiple wine tasting events in San Francisco, we weren't sure what to expect out of this. Turns out it was an outdoor event with fantastic weather, mountains in the background. Over 100 wineries pouring tastings but with a separate wine shop so no one was forcing their wine on you or trying to sell it. About a half dozen restaurants selling different tapas-style bites. The wineries and food were organized in a big circle on the perimeter of the event space and the middle was filled in with tables and chairs, some with umbrellas or under tents for people to just hang out with friends and enjoy the day. We had a nice time. Topped off the day with a nap, a steak dinner at V&A waterfront and explored a bar on Long Street not far from our hotel.

In an effort to not make this a novel, we shall stop here and continue the Cape Town adventure in the next post. I know, I know. The suspense is killing you.