Cape Town collage

I wanted to put up a little collection of photographs from the two weeks my parents and I spent in and around Cape Town before I came to Botswana. I tried to do this by posting pictures directly to the blog, but this got difficult, so I turned to snapfish for help. The photographs are here. Here's a nice map as well to give you a sense of the layout of the Cape Town area.

The first few were taken at the African penguin colony at Boulders Beach. The fuzzy, downy ones are chicks, and the greyish ones are juveniles. The adults have the black and white markings one expects from a penguin. You can read more about them at, yes, wikipedia. (After all, why should I duplicate their work?) After the penguins (who really do sound like donkeys), we found our way down the peninsula to Cape Point and the Cape Point Nature Reserve, where we spotted ostriches, baboons and an eland.

I had not visited Kirstenbosch when I was in Cape Town in 2004. (It's a bit difficult to get to unless it's the endpoint of a Table Mountain hike or one has a car, which I did not.) The garden is sumptuous. It's located on a slope of the mountain that gets frequent rains, and it seems to simply run up the slope of the mountain until it becomes indistinguishable from it. The expansive layout gives one the chance to amble from one set of plants to another, accompanied by flocks of guinea fowl, taking in the views of the city and the mountain.

The view across False Bay comes from a drive we did around to the eastern edge of the bay. (We were staying about midway down the western edge.) False Bay is touted as a good spot for whale watching, as the whales come to the Bay's warmer waters in the winter to calve. We saw whales on two separate occaisions, but I don't have photos, as much of what we were seeing was rippling beneath the water accompanied by the odd flipper or spout of water. I could, however, watch the whalea all day.

We couldn't run around Cape Town and not visit a winery, and Groot Constantia was a wonderful choice. They advise you not to drink all the wine you're given to taste, but... come on, do you think we'd listen?

The last shot comes from the Two Oceans Aquarium, which is one of the better aquaria I've visited. Two Oceans is involved in a campaign to overhaul the public image of the shark in South Africa where, they say, 100 million sharks are killed each year. I am enormously impressed by whoever designed the campaign. I want to describe one of the TV spots:

The spot begins with a crowded beach in summertime. People head into the water with rafts and boards. A few seconds later, people begin running back onto the beach in a panic, screaming, abandoning small children on the sand, etc. The camera slowly pans out into the water and comes to rest on... a toaster. Text appears, reading something to the effect of: "347 people were killed last year by dysfunctional toasters. Only 4 by sharks. Rethink the shark."

I think it's very clever.