Hiking the Mountain

Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous day in Cape Town. It was supposed to rain, but the blue sky held up throughout the morning, so Matt and I decided to take advantage of the weather and hike Table Mountain.

(Sidenote: for those of you who are wondering,”Who is this Matt fellow who you will keep mentioning throughout South Africa blog posts?” – he is my good friend from NYU, also in Public Health, taking the South Africa study abroad course & internship program too. You’ll see him in later Dubai & Italy adventures as well. Yes, that's right, he's traveling around the world and taking awesome photos and doing health research and applying to PhD programs and planning his wedding next year, all while on a "diet." More blog posts to come about food...)

Table Mountain has several different hiking and walking trails, but the only real recommended one is Platteklip Gorge, and the tourism website says that it isn’t for the faint of heart. Because I haven’t been able to workout in weeks, I was skeptical about the trail…but Matt told me that by my climbing Table Mountain, I would be metaphorically climbing an arduous journey in life [this is when I rolled my eyes]. So I sucked it up and climbed.














It was pretty tough at first, but then somehow got better along the way.



















We even made friends with two Cape Town boys – Marno and Ben, both around 12 years old, who became our mini tour guides on the way up. The views were amazing and the reward, still pretty surreal.






















































We lunched at the café on the top of the mountain with Freddy [the gnome]. Until we rode the revolving cable car down the mountain.































Saturday afternoon we went to the VA Waterfront. It’s a cool marina filled with restaurants and shops, including a mall with coutour boutiques. We met up with a friend there, and went to a really nice dinner at Emily’s. They had some pretty neat South African cuisine, which made the long day and long climb totally worth it.





























I still can’t believe I’m in Africa…