Cape Town Day 4. the last day

We awoke to “pizza” and packing, and a quick visit to the nearby shee-shee Italian market/café for some R40 granola. That’s pretty spendy for a bag of roots and twigs, mind you! Anyway, after breakfast and packing up, it was time to drop off the keys and head out for our last adventure in CT, at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden. They claim to be the most Beautiful Garden in Africa, and I don’t think they’re woofin’!

The garden was once the property of Cecil Rhodes (former big man of ZA, and for whom Rhodesia was named before it was reborn as Zimbabwe), which he bequeathed to the nation upon his death. Now it is a repository for much of the native flora of ZA, especially the Western Cape and it’s “fynbos”, a global hotspot of endemism with many species of Erica (heather), Restios (cape reeds) and Proteas (cricket teams, pictured below).

Here again, words pale to give evidence over photos, which again pale to truly relate the experience of walking this beautiful garden in the shadow of Table Mountain. Also on the grounds is a sculpture garden featuring some large Shona works, and a conservatory/glasshouse with the southernmost baobab in Africa.

We left Kirstenbosch revivified, and a bit wan to leave CT, but the airport waits for no one, even if every third flight is heading to Jo’burg. We dropped off our steadfast Corolla, checked into our OneTime flight (OneTime is a ZA expression for “cool”, and a local airline), and relaxed in the waiting area for our flight home.

You must be tired of reading if you’ve gotten this far, so I won’t go into how much trouble it was to find our car at the Jo’burg Airport. Suffice to say, we’re back in PTA, and near our computers.