Quote Of The Day

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)"

Monday, November 12, 2001

Nice boys, shame about the accent...
We took off Friday night from a cold and miserable Heathrow sitting in the very back seat row 53 (do planes really go back that far?). The flight was fine. Not as traumatic as I had feared. When we arrived in Cape Town the sun was shining down and the people were warm and welcoming. We were picked up at the airport by a friend of a friend of a B&B owner and whisked off to our first night's lodgings.

The place was pink, gay and a little too much like Boys In The Band and not enough like Tales Of The City for comfort. We headed off straight away to pick up a car and then on to Camps Bay to pay a much recommended visit to Blues for lunch. Coping with the 'I'll look after your car'/'if you don't tip us we're slash your tyres' guys by the parking spots was a bit of a challenge.

After that we went to the aquarium by the V&A which was fun but we were beginning to flag. But we were determined to start our Garden Route tour as early as possible the following day so we decided to investigate where we were going to stay on our return to Cape Town the following weekend. With this in mind we scouted round all the hotels we could find to see who had the best rooms and the best deals. We settled on Scally's choice of the Victoria Junction. We then went back to the B&B for a bit of a disco nap.\

The over residents were enjoying an early evening drink when we arose. We were the youngest there by 20 years. Heigh-ho. There was a rather cute Norwegian called Sven who took our fancy so we borrowed him for a while. He knew more about English politics than we did.

After getting pleasantly merry we headed off into town - being ferried by a drunken diplomat's widow, Katrina, who lived across the road from the B&B. She was mildly homophobic, fiercely racist and utterly pissed - oh what a fun journey that was. At least I didn't take a swing at her which I might have regretted later.

We ate at a gayish restaurant, Manhattan, where a fresh waiter touched Mark's shoulder once too often and placed his hands on mine wanting to know what I was doing later. It must be something in the wa(i)ter.

Slightly pissed we rolled round to The Bronx, Roberts, back to Manhattan's and then to 55 (a drag bar) where we met up with Sven again. Luckily we ended up home and by ourselves within the hour so honour and dignity was (almost) maintained.

Sunday we awoke to a sweet smell of savoury mince and poached eggs (strange but true breakfast fare). We ate, paid up and headed off west on the N2 - direction Garden Route.

Hugging the coast as much as possible we were amazed by the scenery - the beaches, the mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. After a few hours we decided to try and make it all the way to Mossel Bay by sunset and so cut across country (the roads simply disappeared after a while and turned into dirt tracks). Eventually we made it to a hotel called The Point with a fantastic Indian Ocean view. A well needed night's sleep was due but we decided to go a bit mad. No change there then.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.