//Cape Town: Mountains & Valleys – Jan, Feb, Mar 2019
Picture the WorldMarch 22, 2019

Cape Town: Mountains & Valleys – Jan, Feb, Mar 2019

Table Top Mountain

Table Top Mountain is, of course, the iconic backdrop to the city. At 3,500 feet, it is often buffeted by winds or in the clouds. But on a beautiful day, it’s spectacular.
From Table Top looking west, Camps Bay is below and the Atlantic stretches in the distance. Next land? South America.
Look south along the Cape Peninsula and you can see the Cape of Good Hope in the far distance.
The rocky table top is typical Fynbos vegetation.
Other than tourists, it’s home only to birds and the little cape dassie — a unique species of rock hyrax. This one looks angry, but she’s just crunching a juicy bug.

Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens

On the eastern slopes of Table Mountain lies 1,300 acres of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens. It’s one of our favorite places. From its gardens and lawns one can look across the large valley of greater Cape Town to the Boland mountains in the far, far distance.
The garden is a short R1,100 ($8) Uber ride from the City Centre, we come here often for picnics, and twice for sunset concerts on the grass (below).
Camphor Avenue, named for the great old camphor trees that line it. Well over 100 years old, they were planted before Kirstenbosch was a garden.
The park’s focus is indigenous plants, and there are countless gardens dedicated to different biomes and types.
Wild animals roam the grounds.
For one of us, flowers are the main attraction.
Proteas are endemic to South Africa’s south and southwestern coastal mountain ranges, and the only place most are found.
A king protea just blooming. South Africa’s national flower.

Elgin Valley

One Saturday, we took the weekly steam train to the Elgin Valley. Here it climbs the lower slopes of the Hottentot Holland Mountains with False Bay and the Cape Flats below.
The steam train is a true classic. It’s a bit dusty, but when we were being born, its cars were carrying people through Africa. In college I had a friend from South Africa who left the country by train when he was a wee lad. Maybe on this one?
We chugged through Sir Lowry’s Pass with its “informal housing” along the tracks. Kids and parents waved. In fact everyone we passed waved. Maybe it was the stinky smoke from the oil-fired steam engine.
It took two engines, a double-header, to make it up the grade.
Once through the mountains, we were in the Elgin Valley’s rich agricultural lands, with its orchards and vineyards.
The Elgin train stop itself is an old passenger station next to a retired warehouse that’s now a weekend food market.
Here, next to the steam train, are stacked thousands of crates waiting for this year’s harvest and transport to market.

Franschhoek

Franschhoek, part of the Cape Winelands, is about an hour east of Cape Town proper.
Settled in the late 17th century by a handful of French Protestants escaping catholic persecution, the farmland is almost all vineyards now, but the French influence remains.
We didn’t see much wildlife, but this heron seems to enjoy vineyards, too.
The single Main Street that is the town is so much like the Northern California wine towns of Napa, Sonoma, and the like — with the addition of African arts and crafts.
We stopped at a wine estate whose wine we drink regularly…
Michele ordered us a picnic box, for which they are known, and we stuffed ourselves in the shade of a late summer’s afternoon.
The adjacent farm grows herbs and vegetables for localvores.
Like the Company’s Garden, oak trees are plentiful, as are the American grey squirrels they feed.
We stopped for a bit to watch a woman working to train a horse.
Franschhoek is a smaller valley, made more picturesque by the confining Cape fold mountains. The mountain-pass road from which this picture was taken is built on what was originally an elephant trail — Oliphants Pad — used by herds of elephants as they seasonally migrated between valleys. They’re gone now.

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