Barb and Baden’s Excellent African Adventure – Part 2

London Calling

London is one of those cities that you hear about all of your life and if you’re lucky enough to eventually go there you find that it really does live up to all of its expectations. That’s certainly what Barb and I thought when we came here for our first time 10 years ago and a decade has come and gone for this second visit.

We didn’t have a great start to our arrival at Heathrow as we got stuck in one of those lineups waiting to see the immigration officer that seems to hardly move for over 30 minutes. We took the tube from the airport directly to our hotel and it only took about 10 minutes of hauling around our new luggage to know that we were going to be in for a real struggle with them. Our “new” luggage was really just an old sports bag and a larger duffel bag that we borrowed from my brother Peter. On this trip, we left behind our tried and true 4-wheel drive luggage at home and only packed it in soft bags. The reason for this decision is that one key flight which we will take in Tanzania on the way to our safari will be done on a really small plane that had a strict limitation of no bags heavier than 15 Kg. As a result of this, we had to do a trial run with the new luggage about 2 weeks ago to verify that everything that we planned to pack would actually be under the 15 Kg limit.

The problem with all of this is that while the 4 wheeled luggage that we normally would take is almost effortless to move around the two duffel bags (plus the two small backpacks that we use to carry day-to-day things) ended up being a huge pain to move around for more than 1 block at a time. By the time we walked the 3 blocks from Victoria station to our hotel, we were both exhausted. It didn’t help that London was practically in a heat wave with temperatures around 25 degrees when we arrived on Saturday.

But I digress about all of the luggage hassles because while I happen to be writing this section in the Madrid airport on our way down to South Africa, all of our memories of our day and a half in London were extremely positive.

We had an opportunity to spend Saturday evening with some of my cousins who live in London – all of whom we haven’t seen in 10 years. It’s kind of weird travelling across the world and only seeing family for just a few hours. You end up feeling that was far too short of a time to spend with people whom you haven’t seen is such a long time but it was great to catch up even for that short amount of time.

Walking the Hill

Sunday morning was the day that we leave London and headed south to South Africa via a connection in Madrid. Unfortunately, it will be Monday morning by the time we reach Cape Town so we have another full day of travel ahead of us. However, we don’t leave London until about 6 PM so we have pretty much a full day again here to explore.

On our last (first) visit to London 10 years ago we spent enough time here to visit a lot of the “must-see” places so we really didn’t have a huge list of things to do for today. We ended up deciding that with the weather so good it would be a shame to spend it indoors so we decided to take a walking tour of the Hampton Village part of London. I should confess that we were really tempted to spend some time shopping but (for once in our lives) we didn’t do any shopping while in a major European city for the simple reason that anything that we might buy would have to be hauled around in our luggage for the next 2.5 weeks. Maybe next time.

In hindsight, the walking tour of Hampton village that we did this afternoon was a great idea and a perfect way to spend 2 hours outside on a sunny day. The company that we connected with is called London Walks and the instructions on their website stated to meet at the Hampton tube station about 40 other people were there with the same idea. For £7 each, we were treated to a walk and commentary through one of the most picturesque parts of 18th and 19th century London which is also situated on the tallest hill in London and in some cases gave some great views of the city. All of the interesting historical information that was provided by our guide aside, the walk was a great photo opportunity.

After the walk-in Hampton, we still had some time to burn so we ended up walking through Hyde Park which is one of the biggest parks in central London. Visiting parks in major cities that we visit is a common theme that Barb and I have done on many of our Excellent Adventures. Spending time in a calm natural setting in the middle of a large city surrounded by lots of local people seems to be a great way to contrast the usual hustle and bustle of city streets and shopping malls.

Heading South

Before I finish up my section on London, I have to mention a few great finds that I picked up for my SAP collection.

What’s this you’re saying? What’s with the SAP ads?

Well for those of you who are new I shod explain that I’ve been collecting pictures of [company name] Runs SAP ads from airports around the world for about 8 years now. It’s a small way of me keeping some memories of the places that we’re been to over the years.

Of course, more than one person has asked me “Aren’t the hours that you spend writing on your blog and the hundreds of pictures that you take a small way of keeping some memories of the places that you’ve been to over the years”? Well, technically yes if you’re willing to split hairs but I think that the SAP collection conveys something that the blog articles and the pictures just don’t. And as you know, the holy grail of the SAP airport ads which has not made it to my collection yet is the almost mythical BMW Runs SAP ad. Rumoured to have once hung in the train station in Munich it has eluded me on every visit to Germany so far. If I am lucky enough to get a picture of this ad I think that I could finally retire my SAP collection . 😉

Blowing in to South Africa

Another overnight flight from Madrid had us landing in Johannesburg (or Jo-burg as everyone seems to call it) around 11 AM. As soon as we stepped off the plane we were hit with a wall of heat and humidity as it was around 30 degrees – quite the difference from the low 20s that we experienced in London. However, we knew that the temperatures in this part of South Africa were not going to be any indication of what it would be like in the Cape Town area as we know that the Cape area is quite cooler and much windier (Cape Town is known for its windy climate).

On the flight out to Cape Town we had a great view of the landscape and the flat, arid lands eventually changed into more mountainous geography the more we flew west. This, of course, made sense as all of the pictures that we had seen of Cape Town were those showing the mountains in the background (very similar to Vancouver, in fact).

Our arrival at Cape Town airport was uneventful enough and it was the only time in our trip when we would be picking up a rental car for our 5 days in the Cape area. The Toyota Yaris that we were given was easy enough to drive other than the fact that it was right-hand drive and a manual 5-speed that I had to shift with my left hand. Of course, this all meant that the turn signal was on the right side as well. Now I have driven right-hand drive (which implies driving on the left side of the road) twice before in New Zealand and in Scotland so it was not completely unfamiliar to me. The thing about driving on the left is that you constantly have to be concentrating on driving on the left because your natural tendency (for us) is to drive on the right. What this all means is that you’re constantly reminded that if you lose concentration for even one second it will result in a head-on collision and we will all be dead. As you might imagine this makes driving a bit less relaxing than it might normally be.

So other than the head-on collision and us both dying part, the drive from the Cape Town airport was quite scenic and we drove along the coast to our first South African destination, Simonstown . We arrived late yesterday afternoon at the Boulder’s Beach Lodge and had barely dropped our bags in our room before we ran across the parking lot to the beach to check out the penguins. Yes, it was the penguins that live at this beach that were the reason why we are staying here as it is no secret that Barb loves her penguins.

More adventures in Simonstown and the Cape Town area of South Africa will be in my next posting. I should also say that I will be uploading some of my pictures to my website as I go along. You can view them here .

Baden