Dan's Adventure

Alongside climbing table mountain, at the top of my list for things to do whilst in Cape Town were seeing penguins at Boulders Beach and visiting Cape of Good Hope, the most south western point of Africa. What I didn’t realise was that both are a bit of a distance from Cape Town. This left me with only two choices, either pay for a rather expensive tour or hire a car and drive. Once four of us decided to go and we calculated that hiring a car worked out to be the same cost as one of us going on the tour, the road trip was decided upon.

As the only person with a valid driving license I was driver for the day whilst Jo, who had made the trip previously, was the tour guide. Setting off from Cape Town we headed down the east coast in the morning making a few photo stops along the way before reaching Boulders Beach where in the car park there was a sign warning visitors to check under their car for penguins before driving off. Good sign, no one wants a squished penguin.

We didn’t actually end up paying to go into the walkways at Boulders Beach as we had seen more than enough penguins on the walk around to the entrance. Most were hiding in the shade of the bushes, but we could see lots sunbathing on the rocks near the walkways. Like the seals at Cape Cross and the sharks, it was kind of strange seeing a penguin after spending weeks watching lions, elephants and zebra.

The penguins weren’t the only wildlife spotting that we did on the road trip. After taking the obligatory photos of the sign post at Cape Point we walked along to the lookout point where we started making our sandwiches and just as we sat, down whales started appearing in the distance. Unlike on the Zanzibar ferry crossing, this time we could actually see part of the whale as its head kept appearing from the water. Whales are pretty common there at this time of year, there is actually a whale festival happening near to Cape Town at the moment.

Driving back up the west coast we made a final stop to watch the sunset at Camps Bay Beach, the final African sunset of this trip.