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Cape of Good Hope

Simon’s Town, several miles south of Fish Hoek along the coast, is the country’s third-oldest European settlement.  It is home to the country’s principal naval base.  Also just a few kilometers from the town is home to a colony of African penguins.  They are cute!  The penguins were smaller than we expected and were fun to watch.

We continued on down the beautiful coast to Cape of Good Hope.  We joined the crowds of tourists going up the short, steep walk on De Gama peak to the original lighthouse, built in 1860.  This lighthouse is often shrouded in cloud and failed to keep ships off the rocks so in 1914 another was built lower down and closer to the point

Cape Point is popularly believed to be the meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, although the official meeting happens to the east at Cape Agulhas—on beyond Hermanus which we visited the first week.  At this Cape the cold Benguela current merges with the warm Mozambique current.  The bay on which Fish Hoek is located and is on the east side of the cape is called False Bay because early on, sailors sailing from the east thought they had rounded the Cape.  In fact, they had not, and in reality False Bay can be very dangerous with many hidden rocks and extremely big waves.  There are reports of many ship wrecks in the bay

We hiked from Cape Point with the lighthouse to the westerly Cape of Good Hope along the edge of the cliffs.  On our return we climbed down many steps (about 250!) to the Diaz Beach, named for Bartholomew Diaz of 1488 who is credited with the discovery of the Cape for Europeans.  (Artifacts show that the region was known and utilized since the Early Stone Age.)  We sat and rested and then stuck our toes in the ice-cold water.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 4:22 pm and is filed under South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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