South Africa 27 – Scenery on the Drive Down to the Cape of Good Hope…

On a cold foggy morning, we started a day long excursion from Cape Town to the Cape of Good Hope (near, but not at, the southern most tip of Africa). We had booked our favorite guide who brought a nice spacious van with huge windows for the drive down. The weather wasn’t auspicious, but we had to keep to a schedule and just hope for a break in the clouds later in the day…

We passed several huge coves just south of Cape Town, obviously real estate belonging to the more fortunate with phenomenal coastal views. It was just breathtakingly beautiful, and such a change from the highly populated coastlines of much of the Philippines with roadways. Despite it being late Autumn or early winter, the grass and many plants were still verdantly green.

The fog at first yielded nearly zero usable photos, but soon enough it started to reveal bits of the coastline as we rose further, and the sun/fog combination yielded many eerily beautiful shots. I am sure I have notes somewhere that chronicled this drive down to tell you which bays these were exactly but it doesn’t matter, you will see all of this if you do the drive down to the Cape of Good Hope.

Because we were in our own van and not some huge tourist bus, our guide brought us off the beaten path, to areas he had personally summered at or knew friends in, and we got to private access coves and beaches along the way. He was also aware of the timing of most tour buses (dozens of them streaming to the south like a caravan of pilgrims) and we managed to be ahead of most of them whether at a beautiful pit stop with a great view of a bay, or at an ostrich farm, or to purchase handicrafts by the roadside. If for this intelligence alone, I suggest you pay the little extra needed to do this in a private tour vehicle.

We had expansive coves like this to ourselves and we got pretty darned close to notorious rough waters that claimed many a seafarer’s life near the treacherous crossing at the Cape of Good Hope.

This close up photo of the waves crashing against the rocks shows the immense force, but more importantly, the unusual thick foam that looks almost like whipped or clotted cream that covered parts of the beaches like some dairy confection.

You see some of that foam behind us in this photo. It was really quite cold and the breeze only made things worse, hence, the daughter hiding behind me as the fat windbreaker of sorts… :)

At a lookout near the Cape of Good Hope, a marker shows you distances to major cities around the world.

Another panoramic photo of nearly the end of Africa.

And finally, a photo of one of the phenomenal looking beaches in this area, but our guide said that if you clambered down the rocks to get to it, you would probably sink in until your knees or thighs, as the sand was so soft and deep. This post barely does justice to the sights and sounds of our drive down to the Cape, suffice it say it was one of our best day trips ever. Several of the photos in this post may have been taken by IB, while others were snapped by Mrs. MM.