Table Mountain was a blast and proved to be quite the test for my knee. There’s nothing quite like hiking around on unstable, uneven, rocky ground for a few hours and peeking over the edge of a cliff 1,086 meters above sea level to see if your knee is going to hold up. I got some great shots, but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to take a bad photo in this town. No matter where you stand you can either have an amazing backdrop of Table Mountain, or a breath-taking backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean in your shot.
Once we got back down off the mountain we had lunch at an Italian restaurant in a neat little part of town. After we carbed up we cruised the coastline for a ways, passing through some ritzy beach towns, and eventually found a little vista point where we pulled off to take in the scenery and enjoy the sounds of the ocean. And, as we were all decked out in brilliant orange in preparation for the Holland vs Cameroon game that night, the sounds of passing cars honking and yelling “HOLLAND!” while giving us the thumbs up. Micah and I had a brief discussion of which town we were going to buy a beach house in. I couldn’t decide between Durban and Cape Town when Micah proved his brilliance suggesting one in each, Durban for the winter and Cape Town for the summer. The weather in Cape Town has been pretty nice to us, we really lucked out. I guess it has been dumping rain here for the last week or so, but aside from some chilly mornings and late at night it’s been sunny and nice in the afternoons.
After our jaunt up the coastline we dipped back in to town, found a place to park and decided to check out the amphibious creatures of Cape town…by going to the aquarium. There was some pretty interesting aquatic creatures in there, strange looking crab (what is the plural conjugation for various species of crab? Crab? Crabs? Crabi?), weird amphibious things, poison arrow dart frogs, penguins, and, of course, a gigantic shark tank. Why else would anyone go to an aquarium, except maybe the twice a day puppet show that the Cape Town aquarium has. We didn’t stop to watch it, though it was going on as we walked through. I did make friends with a penguin though, at least he waved at me and I took that to mean he wanted to be friends.
After the aquarium we made our way to the stadium and got there by the skin of our teeth, only two hours before kick off. Green Point Stadium is right by the Atlantic Ocean, not as close as AT&T is to San Francisco Bay but close enough that it smells like the ocean inside the stadium, has Table Mountain behind it, AND we were getting there at sunset. Needless to say I took advantage of those extra two hours to explore every crack and crevice of that stadium to get some good pics. It had been a long day prior to kickoff and I was feeling more like a nap rather than screaming for Cameroon’s head on a spear, then the game started. We’ve been discussing Holland’s lack of concern about advancing to the next round and how they play as if they’re on cruise control, not really showing their full potential and doing just enough to win each game. Tonight they wasted no time flexing their technical skills while continuing to act as if they weren’t really concerned about winning. They had some delicious plays and great chances early in the game, went up by one, and then turned cruise control off and just started coasting for a while. Cameroon drew a free kick that led to a handball in the box, resulting in a penalty kick. Samuel Eto’o converted the p.k. becoming the first person to score against Holland in this World Cup and leveling the scoring back out at one a piece. The exciting thing about this was it forced the Dutchmen to actually try for a few minutes. Arjen Robben was brought on as a super sub around the 70th minute. The orange blotch behind the Holland bench put up a boisterous cheer as he ran from the warm up end of the field to the bench to prepare to enter the game. Once he subbed in the whole stadium erupted, it was pretty cool. But not as cool as when he got his first touch of the ball and anyone who was not watching the game would have thought someone scored, based off the decibel level. Best part of it was that it was just an uneventful one-touch drop pass.
Once we got back to the car, in the nearby parking garage, it took us two hours to move fifty yards. Following the Orange Army to their preferred pub after the game was at the top of our priority list immediately following the game. But once we made it out of the parking garage and saw the dark of night we were all pretty wiped and opted to just head home and call it a night. Or did we?
Check out the condensed 106 photo album here!
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