Day 60 - Cape Town

Today I woke up with the intention of climbing Table Mountain.  By breakfast, the plan was to go down to Cape Point.  Five of us stuffed ourselves into a taxi and took off.  We made several stops along the way, the first notable one being Boulder Beach.  Here, there were colonies with tens of thousands of penguins.  We walked down a path where we could see penguins right next to our feet.  They were so adorable!  But if you got too close they would snap at you.  What makes these penguins so special is that they never divorce.  They pick a mate for life and share all responsibilities equally.  If one is hunting for fish, the other is watching the eggs, and then they switch.  Also, if one is widowed, s/he will wait two mating seasons before finding another mate.

We moved on into Cape Point National Park, where we stopped briefly to look at the wild ostriches wandered around.  (How ridiculous are our lives?)  We carried on to the southwestern-most tip of Africa and scurried off again to Cape Point itself.  This is a large cliff where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, but, due to differences in water temperature, do not mix.  I saw a faint line in the water that I convinced myself was this meeting point.  The colors of the two oceans were starkly different, the cold Atlantic being a dark gray-blue and the warm Indian being bright blue.

We headed back through the park, stopping again to take pictures of baboons in the middle of the road and jumping down off the cliffside.  No big deal.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the day was talking to our radical taxi driver.  He had many opinions that we don’t commonly hear voiced.  He was certainly not a fan of Nelson Mandela, who also had blood on his hands, and had a better life in the days of apartheid, when education was more affordable and houses had yards.  (He was particularly bitter because the day before, his car, which was parked on the street, was broken into.)