Camps Bay

Today we bought a fridge, a simple enough appliance that quickly grows in importance the longer one goes without it.  We certainly enjoyed our take-out meals in the meantime, but our budget did not!  We were fortunate to find a second-hand fridge through a website called Gumtree (same place we found our flat – South Africa's version of Craig's List) that was reasonably priced, exactly the right dimensions, and had no offensive smells or stains.  The seller even offered to deliver it for us so we didn't have to borrow a “bakkie” (pick-up). 

 

Later in the day we went to look at a couch (which we didn't buy – too big to fit through our narrow door) and ended up in Camps Bay, a beautiful town enclosed by the Atlantic Ocean and Table Mountain.  If you look at the banner picture at the top of the blog, it's the strip of beach on the far right.  With its beach, palm trees and strip of hotels and restaurants across the street, it could be a seaside resort almost anywhere in the world.  The views of Table Mountain, however, make it distinctively Capetonian.

 

Other than people like us climbing on rocks and taking pictures, the beach was fairly empty.  Despite the mild temperatures here, it is technically winter and therefore too cool for sunbathing.  The water is much too cold for swimming at almost any time of year (we are told that it is actually colder during the summer because of winds and currents).  Today, though, we encountered a creative solution to this encumbrance – a man and small child inside a large, inflatable, clear plastic bubble.  

They would walk/roll in it like a hamster in a plastic ball (or American Gladiators in Atlasphere – anyone else remember?), protected from the cold and wet.  The waves were pretty strong, though, so they never got very far into the water without being knocked over, to the great amusement of all us lookers-on.