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Old 16 Feb 19, 11:46 PM  
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BONZO
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Cape Town Capers - Day 2 Johannesburg to Cape Town

Day 2 - Friday 11th January

Cape Town Capers
January 2019


Cast (it’s the usual one!)
Me: Shaun, 50’s, loves travelling, eating and drinking (not necessarily in that order!)
Alison: 50’s, ditto to the above!


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Eh? Where am I? Oh yes, I remember now although I was somewhat groggy as you’d expect but not too bad. Must’ve slept really well, I do hope that my snoring didn’t keep others awake at night. Alison tells me she dozed on and off for a while, watched Jurassic World Forgotten Kingdom then fell asleep for a couple of hours before getting up and dressed.

I got up, dressed and drank lots of water before settling down for some breakfast. For some strange reason the cornflakes were served up with just the tiny tea milk jugs! First world problems eh? Alison made better notes than I did so she noted that she had juice, yoghurt, fruit, cereal and a cappuccino.

The photo records tell me that I had the full English!













Still a little fuzzy headed (no surprises there) we touched down at Johannesburg at 7.10 and cleared immigration before collecting our bag from luggage reclaim (there were loads of these animal figures on top of the baggage belts)




followed by another walk before checking in again for the next leg to Cape Town. We’d read that queues here could be horrendous but it was as smooth as smooth could be.

We made our way through very minimal security (there was just a sign to ask people to remove weapons from their bags!) to the SLOW lounge, yes, that’s really the name of the place!








The food looked lovely but not for me, perhaps some other time. I glugged lots of soft drinks and dozed in the corner, wishing that I hadn’t overdone it the day before but lesson learnt I hope. (Alison here: well, I doubt it somewhat – the lesson hasn’t been learnt in about 40 years so far! )

We thought that this whole process would take a lot longer than it did – we’d deliberately left about 3 hours from landing at Johannesburg until the flight to Cape Town, but we could have easily got an earlier flight. Ah well – not to worry, we have somewhere comfortable to wait! We ate a few bits and pieces (some fruit and a muffin).



Lots of lounge staff were constantly tidying and clearing up and bizarrely a gentlemen in top hat and morning suit operating the cloakroom! Time passed and our plane was soon ready to board so we made our way to the gate at about 10am, walked down the air bridge at the gate and stopped. We could see a lot of activity from the ground crew but wasn’t sure what was going on. The heat was steadily building as we waited until we finally got the all clear to board.

The reason for all the delays was that the catering forklift truck had broken down which meant that there was no food or drink available (other than water). It was no big deal really but it was a bit disappointing. The club class seats were big and comfortable



and there was only 3 rows of them so felt lucky that we’d managed to bag them for this flight. Oddly enough there was no IFE but I’d intended to sleep my way to Cape Town anyway.



We touched down at Cape Town just under 2 hours after take off and I felt fully refreshed and ready to go, all the previous days over indulgence had finally worn off, taken a while but there you have it. Thanks to it being a domestic flight there was no passport control



so after collecting our luggage we made our way outside to the Avis car hire desk which had people queuing out of the door.

Hmmm….Then Alison had a brainwave, we are actually Preferred Members so we joined that queue as it was significantly smaller than the normal queue.

Soon enough we had our car sorted out, nice Ford EcoSport, that’ll do nicely. As we walked down to the bay where the car was parked an employee stepped out, greeted us and offered to take our luggage which we kindly declined. He appeared to be insistent on holding doors open, putting bags in the boot etc. which we really didn’t want or need - and we kept telling him no thank you! He hovered around for a bit obviously waiting for a tip so we told him we didn’t have any local currency on us. He looked a little put out but sauntered off to go and help someone else.

Mindful of the mini-meltdown in Australia (ok – I exaggerate), Alison had downloaded the route to the hotel so that we use Google maps offline to get to the hotel. Despite online warnings about hellish traffic into and out of Cape Town we made our way to the Taj Hotel easily enough without any problems, nice driving along on the “correct” side of the road once again.

We parked up and handed over the car keys to the doorman and they said they’d valet park the car for us which was a nice touch. The foyer and bar area were very nicely presented (it was an old bank that's been converted)





After checking in we made our way to our room (709 for the record!) and wow! What a view! We were lucky enough to be upgraded to a full view of Table Mountain, simply stunning!












We showered and changed then relaxed for a while with a cup of tea soaking up the view. Finally we decided we’d better get going so that we didn’t waste the rest of the day so headed back to the lobby to pick up the courtesy shuttle bus to the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront complex as our first port of call. Anyway, that’s not a typo as Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, visited the Cape Colony harbour in 1860 as a sixteen-year-old Royal Navy Midshipman on HMS Euryalus. He made a big impression with the colonials on this first-ever visit by a member of the Royal Family.

The place was a real mix of activities, shops, restaurants and bars coupled with an enormous shopping mall, all along the waterfront.














We checked out the restaurants as we went round for future reference and after some time spent window shopping we decided upon Karibu Restaurant for a bite to eat.





The food was magnificent, I had a trio - Boerewors, lamb chop and a chicken sosatie followed by koekaisters; Alison had ostrich fillet and wedges followed by coconut and apricot jam tartlets. Between us we had a glass of red wine, a sparkling white wine and a large bottle of water and together with a tip it came to about £40. Very good value!













As we finished off our meal the heavens opened outside and we watched people running for cover, a similar situation to those Florida afternoon downpours that didn’t last for very long. With the rain over we made our way back to the minibus shuttle pick up point and just about managed to hop in before it sped off.

We were pretty shattered so just unpacked, then had a coffee and went to bed
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Edited at 12:00 AM.
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Old 17 Feb 19, 09:00 PM  
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Melbatb
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Glad the effects of the first flight soon subsided

What a great view from the hotel room - even with the clouds!
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Index of my trip reports
2016 Quebec - Kuala Lumpar - New York City 2017 Dubai - Eurocamps France - Ontario and Quebec - So-Cal 2018 Montreal - Bangkok - New England 2019 Argentina - Quebec City - Hong Kong - 2020 Switzerland 2022 Arizona - Costa Med Cruise - Oslo 2023 Hong Kong - Gothenburg
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Old 2 Mar 19, 09:00 PM  
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disney owl
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disney owl's Reviews
Hotel Reviews: 1
Restaurant Reviews: 5
hotel looks lovely
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