Day 120 Hout Bay (Greg’s view)

After the rather hectic day yesterday, I was promised a nice relaxing day with a slow start. However, after a very poor attempt at a lie-in, breakfast was served at half 9, not such a slow start if you ask me. It then transpired that this lazy day had been completely abolished and instead we were up and out on route to the national botanical gardens, Kirstenbosch. As we were driving to there, Mum decided to casually mention the fact that she’d actually been for a run at 7 o’clock in the morning, showing that it had never been her intention to have a lazy day. Last time I believe her it seems.

Everything we’ve done in Cape Town so far seems to have had a common theme, every tourist wants to do the same as us, which of course meant the car park was full. After parking up we headed in the gardens, where we stupidly gave Ian the map. After several dull minutes of Ian trying to firstly find his glasses, followed by where we were on the map we set of in search of a canopy walk. We started off walking up a beautiful road with trees up either side covering us in shade. 

Having seemingly walking only a couple of hundred metres, Ian had already lost where we were on the map.  Having fluked our way to the arboretum we found a fascinating tree, called Knobwood so anyone would be interested.

Luckily this tree also happened to be under the canopy walk, brilliant. The views from this walkway were fantastic, from one side you could overlook Newlands and from the other the back of Table Mountain.

Sadly these views were ruined by the feeling of motion sickness, thanks to the slight sway of a very high walkway. Now back on solid ground, we headed up, passing through swathes of people and the odd dinosaur, until we reached the top of the gardens. From here you got another fantastic view of the gardens with Newlands in the background, and this time no motion sickness, result!

As I’m on holiday with two Adventurers, it wasn’t enough to go look around the gardens and relax. No, what they had to do was find the most remote path with barely any people on it.  Thankfully, this path was mostly downhill and finally brought us back in the middle of the gardens.

Ian’s next job was to navigate to the otter pond, so of course we didn’t walk down the huge path taking us directly there. Instead we slalomed between this big path and a large clearing on the other side of some bushes. To be honest, we needn’t have bothered finding the otter pond as it had one lonely otter which was made of metal. The final path took us past some African sculptures, some were outstanding, whilst others were better ignored!  

Mum and Ian insisted we went to the greenhouse before we left as there was a plant in there, called Welwischia, which was apparently special. I was unable to see this plant due to the fact that I was melting in the fifty degree furnace.