Cape Town Capers

There weren’t any really but I like the title. Originally I planned that we would have a full day in Cape Town but in the event we spent a large part of Sunday visiting the Cape Peninsular and the Kirstenbosch Gardens so we spent Monday morning visiting the Rainbows End Estate and having lunch at Hillcrest Berry Farm just off the R310 and close the by Rainbows End Estate. The Gardens and the Estate visits are recorded under other Posts.

We therefore did not actually arrive in Cape Town until early afternoon and we went straight to our hotel, the Cape Heritage Hotel, (www.capeheritage.co.za), which was mercifully easy to find. The hotel announces itself as a “city centre boutique hotel” and is in a delightfully restored building, one of a complex of buildings from the very earliest days of Cape Town. Everything had been sympathetically restored including the bedrooms and the hotel staff all seemed very proud of the results. Once again we found a very helpful and friendly hotel staff. In particular the young lady who seemed to head up the front office was very knowledgeable about her city, her hotel and a very wide range of other subjects. Indeed we got into a discussion about Cape and South African art ant in particular about the paintings with stuck on objects that I discussed in another post. It turned out that the lady who owned the hotel was an art benefactor and tried to support local artists by giving them wall space in the hotel. In particular she had a largish picture by the artist who started the stick on objects paintings which I had already noticed.

Once we were installed the afternoon was taken over by returning a hire car and buying another computer. The car was the easiest to deal with and the return point turned out to be only 5 minutes away. The computer was less easy to resolve but in the end I ended up with one of the new very small laptops which sometimes rejoice in the name “webtops”. Within the hour of getting it back to the hotel I was reunited with all my tour information which was in the “clouds”. I could once again blog and post photographs to my hearts content.

The hotel made several restaurant recommendations and we elected to try the Savoy Cabbage which was just round the corner from and in the same set of restored buildings as the hotel. This turned out to be a great choice. The owner of the restaurant had decided to “leave” the inside of the restaurant bare, ie. bare bricks, exposed piping including the massive air conditioning pipes. The ceilings were very high, all the tables and the stairs were glass and the lighting subdued. The effect was arresting and very different. The food turned out to be very good. Indeed the steak that both Marion I had was cooked to perfection, truly one of the very best I had ever eaten. We washed it down with a bottle of the 2005 Waterford Kevin Allen Shiraz which was a lot better than I remembered from the tasting we had at the Waterford estate, but that was a 2006. We repaired to our bed very happy.