An entry in the TFS Travel Journal
These 5mg ambiens just aren’t doing the trick; we awoke in time to have breakfast on the plane at 7:30am, or 2:30 am South America time. Were met at the airport and driven here for one of the longest stays of our whole trip — 4 days and nights.
Quite the charming inn: a large, stately, old Victorian house with a most colorful history (of families, brothels). Our suite is perfect: a large living room, bedroom and large bathroom, with lots of floral patterns and homey touches. We were welcomed by, and shared breakfast with our hosts, Paddy and Trevor who, we assume, are a couple. We settled in, and adhered to our roles: Wendy napped while Milton went out for a stroll.
The town is charming, a lot like San Diego or San Francisco of many years ago, except for the proliferation of shops and street vendors (against which there is clearly no prohibition) selling African artifacts and the like. Majestically, the famous and imposing Table Mountain dominates the city, which is built around its base. It is so impressive that it looks like a fake background from the Letterman show, and at night the whole front is illuminated, providing an even more other-worldly appearance. Got some errands accomplished, while appreciating how busy and vibrant the city is without really being in your face, then returned to find Wendy still comatose. Got the computer up and running, then joined Wendy in dreamland.
Around 4:00, we slowly came back partially to life, showered and went out for a walk. Amazingly, the city center had basically shut down by late afternoon and it looked like a ghost town. So we taxied over to the Victoria and Albert waterfront, the local South Street Seaport, though with a bigger shopping mall and better restaurants. We meandered about, reveling in the familiarity of the shops (even if their names were different) and the fact that everything is in english - and everyone speaks with a delightful accent - as well as in Afrikaans, a flemish derivative. We tried one restaurant but were turned away without a reservation (we had to come 10,000 miles for that?) but the maitre’d was nice enough to steer us to another place that ended up being just fine. (possibly that’s because we hadn’t eaten a decent meal in 36 hours or so)
We shared a good and spicy fish soup and a greek salad which we sent back mid-way after finding a small worm-like resident. Entrees were a grilled local white fish and the seafood platter, which featured sweet and succulent lobster and crayfish - their local lobster equivalent, along with some wonderfully subtlely flavored calamari. We also greatly enjoyed a local white wine - a Klein Constantia, which was light but flavorful and at $15 one of the most expensive on the list! We even went for desserts: a hot fudge sundae (which they called a Coup Danmark) and a black cherry cheesecake. It was nice to finally get a decaf coffee, a concept basically unknown in S. America. We taxied home and tried to stay up until our new bedtime.