Cape Town!

So we've also just returned from a weekend jaunt down to the mother city, which now officially holds the title of "Most Beautiful City on the Planet" in my book and every other book that matters. The whole city is filled with gorgeous colonial architecture interspersed with neighborhoods that have a distinctly traditional African feel to them, and the whole city gives off this international, cosmopolitan vibe that you really feel walking through its streets at night (in a large group, of course, since the violent crime rate is also off the charts).
On Saturday we visited Robben Island, which for years served as a prison for political prisoners and enemies of apartheid including Nelson Mandela himself. We saw the quarry where he worked, the cell where he stayed, and the courtyard where he hid the manuscripts of his written works, and our tour guides were all former political prisoners of the island. It was a pretty powerful experience that was only slightly cheapened by the appearance of a "Robben Island gift shop" at the end of our tour--in my opinion, some things were never meant to be commercialized or tourist-friendly, but at least it's open to the public.
We also climbed Table Mountain, the huge flat-topped behemoth that towers over the waterfront of the city--pretty much a straight vertical set of rocky projections that they pretend are stairs but are actually each three feet in height and make you feel like you'll have calf muscles the size of watermelons when you reach the top, which you finally reach about two hours later to discover that they've got a nice little cafe at the top and a cable car running up and down the other side of the mountain so that all these people can sit enjoying the view and sipping their tea and laughing at you as you straggle in. But the views from the top of the mountain at sunset were definitely worth it--I would have climbed twice as far for that kind of experience. Probably not three times as far though.
On Sunday we visited the still-under-construction-and-has-been-under-construction-since-1000 B.C. World Cup Stadium in Cape Town, which is looking glorious (have I mentioned yet how obsessed everyone is with 2010 here? They don't even say "World Cup", if you just mention "2010" everybody already knows that you can only be talking about the World Cup, and the local radio station has been counting down the days ever since it was announced that the cup was coming to Africa). We also took a tour of the Cape Point peninsula, famous for its African Penguin colonies (where the youngsters were looking fabulously ugly as they molted off their fuzzy brown coats) and for the Cape of Good Hope, the south-western-most point of Africa, where Diaz and all those other famous explorers first came into harbor. The wildlife tally also included baboons, ostriches, seals, and a really exciting sighting of a rare African Rock Whale off the coast of Cape Point!
I think this weekend will be a trip down the Garden Route, which includes the southern coast of Western Cape, some cool forests and caves and other nature-y things like that, so stay tuned!