Nate's Adventures: Lots of hiking

view of Hout Bay (this is where we are staying)

Cape of Good Hope

We went to The Cape Hope. It is the place that sailors knew they were safe from crashing into the rocks and possibly sinking to their deaths once they passed the point. It is the most southern part of Africa! First, we took about a 30 minute walk up to the point. We took some breaks until we got to the Lighthouse.

lighthouse

sign of major cities

We saw signs of major cities and how many kilometres it was to each city from that point. Sadly, they didn’t have one for Canada :( . We could also explore the cliff lookouts (the views were awesome) and when I looked down a big gust of wind hit my face big time!!!

We also saw the cottages where the people who looked after the Lighthouse lived.

Then we went into another little building that told us about some of the history of the area. Like I said before there were lots of shipwrecks at the Cape of Good Hope. Here are some examples. HNMS Holland, went down on 11th of May, 1786. It was wrecked at night on a trip from Holland to Java (Indonesia). 8 people died. Anne, went down on the 3rd of June 1859. It was wrecked because of a thick fog. Luckily, no one died. Phewf! One more example was the Star of Africa, it went down on the 29th of August, 1880. Suprisingly, only 2 were saved out of the 16. Wow. That’s sad. There was lots of information to read about.

Then, we walked back down and we saw Big Fat Baboons on the roof with a flag of Canada :) Finally, we drove out of the place we saw a Big Fat Baboons on a car!

Table Mountain

We accomplished something awesome!!!! We climbed Table Mountain!

us at the beginning of the climb

the start of the trail

Yup, I climbed it. It was so long! It was 2.5 hours or 2 hours 30 minutes. It was pretty hard, but we all crushed it!

rest stop

It had so so many rock stairs. Mom didn’t like all of the stairs. The scenery was BEAUTIFUL.

We even saw a Protea flower.

A Protea flower is the national flower for South Africa. Did you know that the Protea flower can survive wildfire? The protea has a really thick stem under the ground with sleepy buds in it. Even if the fire destroys the top of the plant the stem will grow after the fire and the sleepy buds will wake up and bloom. Cool.

Finally, when we were almost at the top, someone told us that the cable car was not working! They said it was too windy and they had to shut it down. I was annoyed because I wanted to take the cable car back down. Oh well.