Also, I have a disclaimer that I'd like to make right now and then I'll try not to moan about it after this. Somehow, my camera has managed to pick up numerous little spots somewhere on its inner working, somewhere I'm not able to get to to clean without really messing things up. These spots will eventually be taken out by me during many painful hours of photo editing sometime after we get home. However, any photos I post from along the way will be untouched and thus rather ... spotty. It pains me to no end to let you see the diseased ones, but if I'm going to let you see anything that's going on, that's the way it'll have to be. Please forgive me.
That being said, we've fully enjoyed our time here in Cape Town. The weather hasn't been spectacularly cooperative; it seems Table Mountain truly is a fog and rain magnet, and since our hotel is right at the foot of it, the area has almost always been totally shrouded in clouds. We did manage to squeeze out two absolutely perfect days with blue skies and warm weather, and on the first of those, when we saw the clouds blowing away from the mountain, we threw on our shoes, jumped in the car and raced off to climb it.
It was breathtaking, in more ways than one. The route we took was basically a giant stairmaster, high stone steps going straight up for a hard hour and a half. But the view from the top was well worth it, the city spread out below us like a blanket over the ground. HoJ and I took off on a ramble across the top in search of other views, through the clouds that blew across our path in wisps and curls. We were rewarded with just a glimpse of the view down the other side of the mountain before heading back to convince our weary legs not to give out on the way back down.
Yesterday, our Mercy Ships friend Murray (whose parents we stayed with the first night in South Africa) had arrived back home for a vacation, so we met up with him and he toured us around the Cape Peninsula. It came as no surprise to us that he, one of the most intensely patriotic people we know, was a fabulous tour guide, providing us with all kinds of tidbits of information about the speck in the distance that turned out to be a shipwreck or spotting whales and zebras and springboks in the distance. There is so much beauty in this corner of the world, the soaring cliffs towering over aqua waters, and I'm afraid I'll somehow get filled up when there is so much of the world left to see.Tonight we meet up with Murray's family one last time for a braai at his house, and then we'll return our car to the airport and spend a few hours there before flying out early tomorrow morning for India where our next adventure awaits. It feels like this is really the beginning of our travels, leaving Africa. This continent is so familiar in so many ways, and even South Africa, as alien as it is to the west, has felt comfortable, somehow.
I don't think I'll be able to say the same about India.
