New Westy

New Westy from Siren that I tried the other weekend, delicious weedy aromas with a solid bitter finish layered up with Grapefruit notes and citrus flavours, good effort from Siren here!

Sprung Spring

It's beginning to look a lot like Spring has sprung around these here parts.. 

Friday Treats

We had a meeting in London on Friday afternoon and afterwards treated our kids to a slap up meal in town. We all met up at a bar in Exmouth Market at around 6pm and then headed down the Farringdon Road to a little bistro for some pasta and wine. The wine list was pretty decent and I chose a Bandol (S. France) from Tempier, I'd had this wine several times before over the years and the 2016 was a banger, rich, layered, dark red fruits and plum, very nice indeed! Fortunately the rain eased up as we made our way back to Farringdon Station and a smooth train ride home from Paddington delivered us home in under an hour, an enjoyable evening in town!

Saturday Smile

One of those party games where the music stops and you all have to touch the nearest paedo (allegedly)?

Friday Smirk

The boys discussing how the Abrahamic religions tend to have a pretty poor view of 50% of the population, i.e. Women, apparently their "God" is masculine, they always seem totally confident of this, but how they know it's true is much less clear..

RSA - Part V

 

Our fifth day started around 6am (yawn!), we were headed down the Cape Peninsula (see above) to Cape Point a drive of roughly two hours but I wanted to get an early start as it was a Saturday and the sights down there get hellishly busy as coach loads of "cruise people" descend throughout the day. 

First stop was just past Simons Town (the old British Naval base) and a place called "Boulders Beach", it's here that you can reliably see African Penguins as there's a small  colony there. I came here back in the 90s, I found it fascinating to see Penguins in Africa (so unlikely!), back then the numbers were much more healthy, now, due to over fishing and human encroachment on habitat the colony is sadly much smaller; one of those "see them before they disappear" deals, it's a shame as they are very cute animals (if a bit smelly!)

This is the main "Penguin beach" (above), there were a mix of adult and young here and in some places you could even make out birds sitting on eggs. They seem to tolerate humans pretty well and although you aren't allowed to walk on this particular beach (there are boardwalks) but it's only 100yds from other beaches that are open to the public, apparently sometimes you can actually swim with these little critters! We were glad we arrived so early in the morning, we had the place to ourselves!

After leaving Boulders Beach we headed further down the cape to the national park and Cape Point itself (aka The Cape of Good Hope), the most South Westerly point of the African continent. From the car park you can take a funicular up to the old lighthouse but being keen walkers we decided to leg it up, a decent hike but well worth the views on the way up (the picture below shows the beginning of the trail).

The sign on the left of this picture warns hikers of the dangers of the local Baboon troops, this thought certainly added a little excitement to the walk!

After visiting the Cape we returned to the city and headed up to Table Mountain where there's a cable car that takes you to the top. It was a lovely warm day and the cloud cover at the top of the mountain formed the iconic "tablecloth" effect as warm air hits the back of the mountain rising up to around 3,500ft where is is cooled and condenses, it then falls over the front of the mountain and disappears as it warms again, it's a really cool sight and I shot a little video of the Atlantic side (see below)

The views from the top are predictably spectacular, the whole city is laid out in front of you and since the sky was so blue and the air clear that day we could see for miles and miles, I took a pano of the scene (see below)

The pointy (smaller) mountain on the left of this picture is called "Lions Head", I remember when I visited the city back in the 90s I borrowed a paraglider and took off from that hill. I remember flying around for a bit taking advantage of the on-shore breeze and the local topology that created great ridge lift, the landing point was a bit exciting though, a beach below the peak which would be fine if it were empty but it was really crowded at the time, luckily I was precise enough to touch down in between the towels and deck chairs!

This was our last day in Cape Town as the following day we were headed up the Garden Route. First stop was a place called Hermanus a couple of hours drive North up the coast, more on that in the next episode..

Clowns

Definitely a clown but it's not Coco we're dealing with...