Day 10 – The Table
This was our last full day in Cape Town. One odd thing about
the city I’ve come to realize in my last three trips here, trips that have all
ended with me taking a Monday night flight back and therefore being fully a tourist
on Sunday, is how eerily quiet the city is on Sundays. Getting an uber takes
significantly longer. The streets are night empty in the mornings, there are a
swath of bars that are just outright closed. It’s a bit sad, I guess, but
mainly because United’s direct flight back is on Monday and not Sunday, so to
some degree we were stuck being tourists on a day the city gets prepped for a
busy week of work.
That all said, there was still a lot of fun and wonder to be had. The day started with my dad going for a tour of Robben Island starting at 9am, my Mom taking the opportunity to pack and repack, and me going for a quick hike on the Contour Path. It is a gorgeous hike starting in Constantia Nek, on the back side of Table Mountain (technically another peak called Skeleton Gorge). The normal hike ends in Kirstenbosch National Gardens, with a free entry to the park as credit for a job well done. I needed to do a slightly shorter version to make our various timings work, so instead I took an earlier exit point that ends not in the park. Still the hike was gorgeous, with another cloudless day, a nicely timed one given the main event of Table Mountain later in the day.
From the end of the hike, I ubered back (had to wait about 10 minutes for someone to accept, who was then 10 minutes away) putting me slightly late to return back to the AirBNB and pick up my Mom on our way out to the waterfront to then pick up my Dad who was returning from his tour. He loved the tour, which is excellent if a bit long at 4 hours (including the jetty there and back), but super informative and a must-do at some point in Cape Town. Just it is plainly not something that needs re-doing.
My Mom and I meandered around the waterfront. I'll say this, they find less innate pleasure out of wandering aimlessly in the Waterfront than I do, which is fully understandable, but I think overtime I'll make them converts. We picked up my Dad and then headed off back to the Neighborgoods Market in teh Old Biscuit Mill, this time for lunch and to buy a matching set of custom made African Wood cutting boards (about $25-30 each). It took me way to long to pick my meal, ultimatley going for a Tanzanian braised beef stew with greens and dhal (more on the Indian-ish African food coming up in much more detail), and a side of two corn fritters that had a lot of other ingredients seemingly well mixed into kernels of corn and lightly fried. Honestly, the corn piece was the star. We enjoyed our time in the Neighborgoods Market, which might be the best new find of my time in Cape Town.
From there, we headed to Table Mountain. It is the singular star attraction of Cape Town proper, one very much unlike Robben Island in that it is worth re-seeing. Granted, a lot fo that has to do with it not taking four hours, but on a busy day with a good line, it can be time consuming. Once again, Sunday is not a busy day, so it wasn't, and we were up in about thirty minutes from leaving the market. I had to tell my parents repeatedly when we were dropped off and even during the cable car ride that the views would only get better. They understandably could not believe that that was possible, but they became believers quick on the summit.
I'm quick to say I find the best view of Cape Town to be from Signal Hill, precisely because Table Mountain is in it, but the view from Table Mountain, to put it in my dad's words "is hard to describe in words." I took a patient route at the main landing space, first having them view Camps Bay and the immediate South, down to the views of the Cape Peninsula, and finally over to the viewpoint of the city from end to end. I hadn't done this since 2018, so even for me the sheer brilliance of the view was overwhelming. Table Mountain remains one of the great singular tourist experiences in the world, one that cannot get overrated.
After, my parents were rather tired so I dropped them back at the AirBNB and headed back to the Waterfront to meander some more, both to go through the Watershed and buy the umpteenth Penguin and a few other random wares and just soak in the experience. Ever since Mitchell's got rid of the Milk & Honey beer, I've had one less place to abscond to, but with Cause Effect and so many others, I truly never do get tired of it.
Dinner was also a new experience, goiung to Gold which is a restaurant of some fame. They serve 14 courses family style (6 starters, then 6 mains/sides, and 2 desserts) over the course of 2h30m, with live music and performances. The one additional piece being each dish is from a different country of Africa, really fron end to end, with Moroccon Couscous and Tunisian Taboullah, down to Cape Malay cuisine. The food was all reasonably good, perfect family style stuff. The one throughline seemed to be fried starters (but not overly oily) my favorite being a Zimbabwean Sweet Potato ball and a Xhosa fried corn and spinach patty. The next throughline was a hint of sweetness in all the mains, from a bit of sugar in a lemon chicken curry (Cameroon), to a hit of sweetness in the South Africa lamb and springbok bobotie. The food is all good (and quite cheap) and the entertainment is quite fun. The most interesting part was a series of giant groups that left coming out of one room that was seemingly one-half of the second floor we were seated on. Late in our meal, we were told a dance performance was going on in the "main room", which once we entered we realized had a capacity of like 200 people, with a cruise like set-up. Gold is huge, it is fine, it is worth doing.
From there we went to Cause Effect one last time, my Dad fully bought in to the pizzazz of it all. They were having a quiet night (truly I've found few places that cater to late night drinking on a Sunday aside from the lowest brow of low-bron Long Street clubs. We took a photo with some of the bartenders and staff, and were soon enough headed back to the AirBNB ending a fully content, if slow Sunday.
Day 11 - The Red Bus
In a weird way, if you said you had a 10-hour layover, you would think that's enough time to do a lot. But if you have a last day of your vacation from 9am - 6pm, it sounds pretty short, We tried to make the most of it, with a few firsts for my parents. The star of the show was our time on Signal Hill, them realizing quickly how special a spot it was. It wasn't sunset, but it's pretty easy to make the leap to how magical sunset would be with the sun descending over the atlantic from the carpeted area built on one side of the cliff.
From Signal Hill, we went to Bo-Kaap, an area I hadn'[t been over the course of the prior five trips, honestly due mostly to not knowing about it. The first time I really saw it was on Somebody Feed Phil. We didn't time it to have a meal there, but did stop at a coffee shop for a iced cappucino (Bo-Kaap Deli) and then a spice store to pick up za'atar, along with their version of peri-peri. The food is completely secondary in Bo-Kaap anyway. The star of the show is the rows of pastel painted houses, no two side by side houses the same. From greens to yellows to light purples to oranges. They were stunning, and well worth the quick trip there which led us to a walk down Bree street to our lunch at Seabreeze.
Seabreeze is a straight seafood spot on Bree, with great outdoor seating where you can just watch the world go by. They were missing a few items (most oddly, completely out of full mussels, which is something of a specialty in the area) but we split four good starters. The best was probably a salt and pepper mussel dish which was so lightly dusted by a deep fryer, with a great green sauce underneath. Alongside it was an interesting dish of picked fish pani puri, which was tasty that very much missing the liquid component of pani puri. Pickled octopus was a nice accompaniament, as was a really fresh prawn taco with a great mango & pomegranate sauce. Our main was a well cooked cobb (white fish) with a ginger veloute and crispy mussels. Seabreeze consistently has great food (this was my third time there), with a great setting, and a proper final full meal.
From there, we took a hop-on, hop-off bus through the main route of 12 stops (75 min end to end, we did about 45 of it). Some woudl call these double decker red buses the bane of travelers existences - nothing says you are a visitor than getting off and on them. Certainly I too was a bit skeptical, but it was a fun ride from Table Mountain to Camps Bay, and then Camps Bay huggingg the shoreline back to the Waterfront.
Camps Bay is gorgeous, from teh white sand beaches, the great flora, the dominance of Lion's Head, Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles behind you, and the rows of beautiful villas and houses cut into the cliffs. The line of restaurants on the main road are a bit more corporate (including a Starbucks to my dismay) then both what I would've liked and what I remember from prior dalliances in 2016 and 2018. It does house one special place - the initial location of Cause Effect, which I hadn't yet been. As my parents left to grab gelato, I was there grabbing a last cocktail, a perfectly umami-ized beet and ginger cocktail served in an oyster shell with billowing clouds of liquid nitrogen coming from every direction. A nice final drink to be sure.
On our return to the Waterfront, we took in the sight for the last time. That visual of the city, with Devil's Peak, Table Mountain, Lion's Head and Signal Hill behind it will never, ever, ever get old. We walked back towards the AirBNB, stopping for coffees and snacks at Bootlegger, a chain spot that had a location right next to our AirBNB. We said our goodbyes, all of us a bit emotional and sad to leave the gorgeous city, even me leaving for a sixth time knowing that there will be a seventh.
