Went up to Table Mountain today. Table Mountain is the large flat mountain that lies to the south of Cape Town, and overlooks the downtown and surrounding area, called the City Bowl. It is over 1000 meters high, and obviously gets it's name from it's large flat table top. You can take a cable car up, or choose to hike it, but as fog rolls in quite frequently and tends to stick around, hikers tend to get trapped when the 300+ routes tend to disappear, so most people take the cable car.
That and the fact that people have died from time to time trying to hike up to the top. The clouds seemingly always surrounding Table Mountain are known as 'The Tablecloth'.
There were several hundred people in line when I first showed up, accompanied by some people from the hostel. The cable car had broken down the day before, so there were a lot of people returning from yesterday, combined with the fact that the weather here is so fickle, this was the first day in about a week that Table Mountain had been visible.
We got our tickets and stood in line, only to find out they were allowing people from yesterday that had tickets to jump the line and head straight up. That, as well as that the cable car was now running much slower as it was not fully fixed yet, and the high winds, made everything go much, much slower. Much. We waited in line for about an hour and a half before finally getting on the car, and taking the 6 minute ride to the top.
It was very windy at the top, and has spectacular views of both Cape Town, and the southern cape, stretching all the way to the most southern point in Africa. You could see all the way down. There were also great views of Lion Rock, and the Ocean in any direction you looked.
The edges in most places were secured by railings, but if you got in the right spot, you could look all the way down...... 1000+ meters is a long way to drop. Great spot to go have a look at the layout of the city, if you can manage to get there on a day where there is no clouds.
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