Tuesday, April 8.  The Paris to Cape Town flight was full.  The four of us, me, Stella, Beverly and Gretchen had the four seats in the middle of the plane. Stella was on one aisle, Gretchen was on the other, I was between Stella and Beverly, and Beverly was between me and Gretchen.  We were butt to butt to butt to butt.  Gretchen and Stella used the aisle armrests but we did not use the other three that were between us because we had more room without them. 

This morning, we left the hotel at 8 am to do a tour to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope.  We had a large 20 passenger van to travel in.  Conrad is the local guide.  He's 28 and very buff.  And he knows the area well and all the history that goes along with it.  But I digress, when we all loaded into the van, the four of us were in the seats right behind the driver and guide.  Butt to butt to butt to butt again.  I sat next to the outer "wall", then Stella, then Gretchen, and then Beverly.  At one point, we were supposed to give a show of hands on what menu item we wanted for lunch.  We took a lot of ridicule from the others because we were late getting our hands up and Reid (our tour guide) had to recount twice.  I finally said "we're so jammed in here that we can't get our hands up" which was pretty much true. 

We went by some beautiful bays with nice beaches today.  It was an absolutely perfect day weatherwise.  No wind, sunny but not too hot.  We went to Cape Point where it was foggy, and it is most of the time apparently.  We had 45 minutes to hike to the top of the Point to the lighthouse or take pictures or whatever.  Well, we spent 40 minutes in the gift shop.  A few climbed to the lighthouse where they could see nothing but fog so they went into the gift shop to look at postcards to see what they couldn't see up there.  At the parking lotfor this location, there were a lot of "Baboons are dangerous. They are attracted to food" signs, but did not see any.  We stopped at an ostrich breeding center this morning and looked at them for a few minutes. 

We had to wait in line at the Cape of Good Hope sign to take pictures.  A busload of Asian tourists were there and they took a long time to get organized for their pictures.  The Cape of Good Hope is the most southwesterly point of Africa.  It was a very scenic drive today.  After the pictures there, we continued on to a penguin colony.  They are very small penguins, maybe 12 inches high.  There had originally been penguins there but had been decimated by predation.  In 1986, two breeding pairs were brought in and now they estimate there are 3000 at this location.  They were very close to the boardwalk, some only a couple of feet away.  After spending about 15 minutes there, we went to lunch and then on to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden.  It's a very large area.  We walked around part of it and then went to the gift shop and ate gelato.  Do you sense a pattern here?  :) 

After that, we beat feet back to Cape Town to catch the last cable car up Table Mountain.  Table Mountain is about 3600 feet in elevation but it goes from sea level to that elevation, so it is very steep.  A few members of our group were not enthused about going in a cable car.  A very steep cable car that the floor rotated all the way up so you can get a good 360 degree view, but  they sucked it up and went.  I thought it was great and the views are fantastic from there.   A wonderful sunset.  We saw some dassies, which I thought were marmots, there.  Not very wild either.  One ran within about 6 inches of Stella.  Never get between a dassie and its food, not a good idea. 

Dinner was on our own tonight so a group of  8 of us walked down to a burger restaurant that had been recommended by some locals and it was very good.

Tomorrow we're off to do the winery tour.