Week 83: Cape Town

I spent this week in Cape Town, which is one of my favorite cities so far. I arrived on a local minibus taxi with a journey that should have taken 4 hours and actually took 10, luckily my CouchSurfing host didn’t mind too much that I arrived so late.

Cape Town is a beautiful city, you can see Table Mountain from almost anywhere in the city. As I walked around I was reminded of European cities that I have visited in the past. Although Cape Town is nothing at all like Africa, it is still a great place to be.

Finally I had arrived in a modern city so I decided to take my mobile phone and my camera into the shops to get them repaired. The phone was supposed to take 2 hours but they kept it for 4 days before I had to collect it in the same state it was in before. The camera was supposed to take 2 days but took 3 and again they hadn’t fixed it. I guess these things will have to wait until Australia.

On a more positive note, I bought myself a new GoPro 3 camera, I have been wanting one of these for some time now so that I can get some better video footage of the places I go. The only problem was that all the shops had sold out of the memory cards, so it took me another day or two of going to camera shops before I found the memory card to start using the camera.

I also met up with a friend, Camilla, I originally met her in Monkey Bay, Malawi about 9 months ago. We went out for some drinks and caught up before I went to the cinema, for the first time in over a year, to see The Hobbit. On the way back to town from the cinema I had an awesome view of the city, Table mountain towering behind the cityscape and ‘the cloth’ (the clouds blowing over the top of table mountain) constantly rolling off the top and disappearing as it fell.

I left my couch surfing hosts place after 3 nights and moved into a backpackers, luckily I had been contacted by a guy through CouchSurfing who wanted to meet up. He has been traveling for around 7 years and is a really fun guy to spend time with. He actually stayed in Australia at one point so has given me a few contacts there.

Now my time in Africa is over and I will start my 48 hour journey from Cape Town to Perth. I feel sad to be leaving Africa, I have so many great memories from this continent, so many people and places that I will miss so much that it is hard to leave. But still, I know that seeing new places means leaving behind others.