And Now for Something Completely Different

looking back to December 2016:

Cape Town!  Oh, my dears.

Not the whole city, but a decent portion of it, from Lion's Head mountain.

I'd never really given it much thought, and it certainly wasn't someplace I planned to visit.  However, a group of PCV friends were going, which meant none of them would be available to go anywhere I did yearn to visit, and with the office closed for the festive season, I'd either languish sweating through another December alone, or spend too much money looking at things with no one to share the expenses or my sense of wonder, or to help me up when I fell off a mountain.  So when one of my friends had to drop out of the Cape Town trip, I asked if I could take his place and was glad to be accepted.

Part of the fynbos microecoregion or whatever.

The others did the bulk of the planning, which was fine with me.  I'm big on serendipity and somewhat lighter on internet access, and as a late addition to the group, I didn't wish to push.  And it worked out beautifully, though I wish I'd figured out a way to get to Robben Island, and maybe a township tour.

Sunset over table mountain from the Air B&B

I do question, too, whether I'd be quite as enraptured with Cape Town if I hadn't spent 18 months in a small town in a sparsely-populated, often poor desert country where I wasn't allowed to drive.  However, given those conditions I was seriously enraptured.

Fynbos on a mountain over an ocean.  Love this a lot.

Here are a few of the reasons:

1)  Uber.  You could just push a few buttons on your phone, and a car would arrive in a minute or two and take you where you wanted to go moderately safely without driving around in circles for 45 minutes first, gathering six or seven other people to pile on top of you.

Any of these cars might be Uber cars.

2)  Mountains.  Gorgeous mountains covered with greenery ring the city.  You can reach one in a few minutes with Uber and climb a well-marked trail to the top.

Half a moon over Table Mountain

3)  Ocean.  The part of the city that isn't bounded by gloriously green mountains is bounded by beautiful blue ocean.

Near the Cape of Good Hope

from Chapman's Peak Drive

4)  Art galleries, nightlife, all kinds of cultural stuff.  Several art galleries, one so crammed with paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures in myriad media that I clasped my hands in front of myself for fear I might knock something over.  Some artwork by artists with African- instead of European-sounding names.  Local traditional dancers doing street performances.  DJ's of many styles; signs of bands, cinemas and theaters though we didn't make time for movies and the only band we saw was a pretty modest cover band in a mock-Irish pub.

We just missed open-mike performances at this bar,
which is in the neighborhood where I visited art galleries.

5)  Bo Kaap.  The gorgeous neighborhood where we stayed in an Air B&B is clean, cobbled, hilly and very brightly painted.  It's got a lot of Muslims, so we heard the call to prayer ring out periodically.

Bo Kaap!

6)  Restaurants.  We had a full kitchen and tight budgets, and nonetheless we ate out most meals.  One night at Fork, a tapas place, I had one of the best meals I've ever had anywhere.  There was also a chocolate shop, a couple markets with artisanal food stalls including mushroom amazingness and fine cheeses, Mexican, a steampunk place...  Good whole-wheat bread was still hard to find, oddly.

I wanted to move in to the Honest Chocolate shop,
which had a gin bar in the back at night.

The chocolate pecan brownies were a large part of why.  Also the staff.

Not hugely important, but it was fun to run into buckets of gin everywhere.

7)  Company.  We spoke the same language in many more ways than the obvious one.  And we spent boatloads of time together, for over a week, sharing two bedrooms and a single bathroom, with no apparent tension.

Omajete, Khorixas, Mpungu, Swakopmund, Arandis.  On a mountain.

8)  Architecture.  The parts of the city we explored were great mixes of ornate and stately 18th through 20th century edifices, gleaming high rises, brightly-painted, modest single-family homes, New Orleans-like beer palaces and a bunch of other stuff I can't identify.  It was all gorgeous, and it all blended quite successfully.

This might be the Cape Dutch style.

This one, too, I think.

And here they are mixed up together.

9)  The amazing view from our front deck; cf: mountains, ocean, architecture and Bo Kaap.

Table Mountain, from the front door.

10)  Ecological uniqueness!  One of our guides claimed Cape Town's fynbos ecology is a globally unique biome, which gets a scholarly argument from Wikipedia.  However, it does seem to have an enormously high number of endemic species -- 6,000 types of vegetation you can't find growing naturally anywhere else.  So that was pretty amazing, and interesting, and very new information.

The botanical garden celebrates vegetative diversity, plus mountains.

They are really big on protea, which come in many sizes and colours
plus the national cricket team.