After 44 days I am ready to return home. This vacation of a lifetime–even surpassing the feeling I had after visiting the DPRK and PR China–must come to an end. This morning two fellow travellers from the trip to Tristan da Cunha, Martin Crawford and his son Murray, as well as their dog Flicka, and I climbed Table Mountain. We started at the Theresa Avenue entrance and hiked through the Twelve Apostles and climbed Table Mountain from the back. We took several trails along the way and spent a solid 5½ hours hiking. Martin and Murray walked down but I wanted to take the aerial cableway. I wanted a different perspective as the cable car descended where hikers couldn’t. I am glad I saved the time by taking the cable car, as I still had two more bookstores to visit before they closed at 5 p.m. I returned to Clarke’s Bookshop, where I didn’t have enough time to look around on Saturday. I was extremely happy to pick up an autographed edition, with dust jacket, of Tristan da Cunha and the Roaring Forties by none other than Martin’s father (and Murray’s grandfather) Allan Crawford. After Clarke’s I headed to Select Books, which specializes in books about Africa. There I got two different books on the history of Lesotho and an older edition when it was a British colony called Basutoland, a history of Swaziland, and a book celebrating the “independence” of Bantu homeland Bophuthatswana. Everything fits in my suitcase and carry-on luggage.
We had to climb two ladders as steep as this:
Overlooking Camps Bay from the Twelve Apostles:
Cape Town and Table Bay, with Robben Island on the left:
The Agulhas II is still in port. Can you find it?
Why it’s called Table Mountain:
A rock hyrax, also known locally as a dassie:
