Today we did a walking tour of the main highlights of the central portion of Cape Town. We started with a delicious breakfast at our hotel, and then headed out the the Castle of Good Hope, a castle built in Cape Town in the 1600s. It's the oldest surviving colonial building in town (maybe even in South Africa). We got a guided tour of that, which included tours of the parade grounds, arsenal, garrison, dungeon, torture room, and pool. It was a very good tour and quite informative about the early history. From the castle, we walked past the District Six museum (we didn't take the time for it today but plan to come back later in the week) and over to the Company's Gardens. This is (today) basically a park in the center of town. In the "early days" (which is how the locals seem to refer to the Dutch colonial days), it was basically a farm run by the Dutch East India Company to grow herbs and vegetables. Inside the gardens, we visited the South Africa Museum, which is largely a natural history museum. However, it does have a great display on rock art, which was quite neat. We also saw an enormous blue whale skeleton. We then walked through the park to St. George's Cathedral, then stopped for a late lunch in a lovely pedestrian mall just near the cathedral. After lunch, we headed to the Slave Lodge, which turned out to be a must see... a really terrific museum. The museum is (not surprisingly) about the history of slavery in South Africa, most specifically in Cape Town. The exhibits were really informative, easy to walk through, and told very interesting stories. The museum also had a really nice exhibit on the life of Nelson Mandela. We spent a couple of hours here. We then walked through the city, through Greenmarket Square, but the market was closing down for the day. We ended with a walk back to our hotel.
This evening, Tim and I went to dinner back at the waterfront. Tim picked out a great restaurant (Belthazar), and, like the choice last night, it did not disappoint. It was recently rated the best steak house in South Africa. I had steak (seemed like a reasonable choice), and Tim had the game kabob, which included wildebeast, springbok, impala, and kudu. The dinner was fabulous. The restaurant is also known for its selections of wines by the glass... its claimed to have the largest wine list in the world. Luckily, they also employed an excellent sommelier who made sure we didn't stray. It was a great dinner.
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