Sunday September 28th

Today we got up for breakfast again at 8:00 and planned out our day. We decided to hike Table Mountain in the morning and then go on an adventure in the afternoon to an ostrich farm, wine lands, Cape of Good Hope, or wherever else we might want to go. Today is really our last free day in Cape Town because tomorrow we leave for our safari!

Lacey, Slap Shot, our friend Matt, and two other girls and I all left the ship around 10 after getting organized and hired a cab driver waiting right outside the ship. It cost us 20 rand a piece to drive the 15 minutes to table mountain, about $2.50 USD. You can start from the very bottom of the mountain, which kind of meshes with Cape Town and there is no real definite beginning, but most people start about half way up. There is a cable car that shuttles people to the top and back and most hiking trails start from here. We chose a medium level trail. The trail was in very good condition and was a lot of steps. The steps were made out of rock from the mountain though. The trail zig zagged back and forth all the way up because the mountain in most places is just a sheer rock wall. All in all it took us about an hour and a half to make it to the top. The top was actually flat! Who would have thought! The views of Cape Town were amazing. And on the opposite side of the mountain, you could see out to the end of Cape Hope, a rugged peninsula jutting out into the ocean from Cape Town. It was very windy and cool on top. The flat portion on top actually strands two miles long! There are nice walking paths on top because Table Mountain was made a national park.

After spending a little bit of time on top enjoying the views, we took the cable car back down around 1 pm. Our group split up a little bit and a few went skydiving. Lacey, Matt, Antoinette and I went to a big open air market down near the waterfront. We spent a little time here buying a few souvenirs and got ourselves together at 3pm and headed back to the ship to regroup. Already our day was winding down. We decided to take a train out to Stellenbosch, a small town in the wine lands and have a nice dinner. We walked the 20 minutes to the train station and found out we had no problem getting there but the trains stopped running at 7pm because it was Sunday. So we bagged that idea and walked around down town Cape Town and settled to eat at a restaurant much like TGI Fridays. It was good to sit down after a long day of walking. We all ordered wine with dinner so at least we could say we had wine from South Africa. We made it back to the ship at 9ish and I called it a night because tomorrow we are meeting at 2:30 am to go to the airport to catch our 5:45am flight to Johannesburg!