Saturday, Day 84

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Jill and I take the city bus for a trip on the other side of Table Mountain and around the nearby peninsula sea shore, with a stop at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.

The garden is huge with 528 hectares set on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain showcasing only indigenous plants.  This is the “backside” of the precipitous Table Mountain famously depicted as emblematic of Cape Town.  Because there is far more rainfall and far less wind on this side the gardens include lush rolling lawns, streams, and wide paths with sweeping views of the city, far off valleys and mountains.

Kirstenbosch is one of eight national botanical gardens covering five of South Africa’s six different biomes.  Established in 1913 by the Cambridge botanist Henry Harold Pearson on land bequeathed by Cecil John Rhodes, it is the first botanical garden in the world founded for the specific purpose of preserving a country’s unique flora.

There is a spectacular collection of proteas, fynbos, and cycads and a great variety of birds.  On the very fine day we visit there are many people picnicking on the St. Augustine grass lawns and hiking up the trails.  The Skeleton Gorge trail (also known as Smuts’ Track) is one of the most popular for climbing up to the top of Table Mountain.  (Most people take the cable car up on the more forbidding northern side but if the winds are blustery the cable car shuts down.  That happens frequently enough that the trail is well used by hikers both up and down.  There are other paths but this one is the most clearly marked.  That can be important if the “tablecloth” clouds roll in and visibility becomes poor—see Chapter 24.)  Also on the day we visit, hundreds of people are running the Two Oceans Marathon near the entrance to the gardens so it is a lively scene even this far away from downtown.

Since I couldn’t make any headway in an effort to argue for “packing out” waste in a small, local  public garden a couple of years back, I am gratified to see that the Kirstenbosch, one of the world’s finest botanical gardens, has come to the same conclusion. All those citizens picknicking and playing on the grounds are asked to take their packaging with them.  And they do.

Cape Town offers an extraordinary number of ways for people to walk, run and otherwise engage in vigorous exercise out of doors.  The mountains are so close to the seashore that almost any kind of activity is possible and we see just about every variant.  Our bus ride takes us by farms and many of the luxury fenced and gated communities surrounded by razor wire as well as poor townships on its way through mountains, valleys, and beaches before arriving back at the harbor.

Finally, soccer is huge in South Africa and Cape Town will host the 2010 World Cup.  Almost finished is a brand new stadium for the 7 weeks of matches.  It can be seen from the Beach Road in Green Point just to the west of the harbor.  I try to find World Cup patches for my nieces and nephews who play soccer but no luck.  I buy my sister Rita, a girls’ soccer coach, a single official T-shirt that is certainly the most expensive T-shirt I ever expect to purchase.