So, today I went to Cape Town Castle - I will now pause as all the Porter family either roll around on the floor laughing or roll their eyes in irony at me visiting a castle on my holidays - but I went.

As I said yesterday, seriously, this is a fort not a castle, but it's a pretty cool fort and one of the oldest buildings left in Cape Town and probably South Africa. Picked up the free guided tour at 11am and had the walk around. Unfortunately, they were preparing for a performance of Fidelio in the parade ground (this weekend I guess), so it was a little difficult to concentrate at times with all the banging going on building the set and the stands. But it has all the expected stuff - dungeons, arsenal, gates, cells & posh staff apartments and unlike most English castles I was dragged around in my childhood, this one is actually intact - something of a novelty for me to walk around an intact castle!!! It was nice not to have to imagine what it looked like and it's a nice looking fort. Well worth the visit.

The museums were pretty good and the displays in the military museum look like they will be excellent once they are completed. I didn't do British Imperial history at either school or college, so knew nothing about the Boer war, except that it was in South Africa. Apparently, that is where the British invented concentration camps and the numbers involved are pretty frightening. And the distances vast - how people co-ordinated a war across such huge distances in those days, honestly it must have been more luck than judgement. And the British don't come out of any of it with much merit - which is probably why I didn't get taught it at school!!

Missed the Horse & Cart ride through the old part of Cape Town, so decided to head back to the hotel for a couple of hours by the pool in the sunshine.

So after slapping on the Factor 50 and getting myself sorted I get down to the pool - which isn't the biggest pool in the world - and organise myself under an umbrella to have my head in the shade - no sunstroke for me thank you very much - and what happens?? The wind gets up & cloud cover comes in off the bay after about 5 minutes of nice calm sunshine & I'm freezing. Fortunately, it calmed down a bit after a while so I got a nice couple of hours in the late afternoon sunshine. Lovely.

Will go down to the Waterfront for some dinner this evening, as I need to buy some batteries for my camera - found out what was wrong with the flippin' thing - it rips through batteries like you wouldn't believe - so will go buy a pack tonight, so that I have them for Kruger. Do not want to be without my camera on that trip!!