For those of you that have been reading these blogs over the last few days, I'm sure you're wondering whether or not I've got to the top of Table Mountain. Well, as reported below, the first day was rained/clouded out so we headed out on the beers. Sunday was much the same as Saturday - low cloud and more beers. This morning, however, bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky! I noticed whilst putting my shirt on to go to work. Bugger!
Well, I've been emailing an old friend of mine, Jackie, who I used to work with back in the London days as she's also coming over here to South Africa on safari and spending some time in Cape Town. Anyway, she suggested that I should duck out from work whilst the weather's good (particularly as it's supposed to be cloudy again tomorrow) to take get up the mountain and see the view.
I thought about it for about .... oooh ..... lets say about 15 seconds and thought why not. My last meeting of the day was a 2:00 to 3:00 and that would give me plenty of time. So, I arranged for one of my colleagues here in South Africa to take me back to the hotel so I could dump my computer and then drop me off at the cable car to go up the mountain. He agreed and dropped me off. We had a quick chat and I thanked him for his hospitality etc. etc. and he left pointing me in the direction of the ticket desk.
There's normally a queue for tickets (apparently), however there wasn't when I got there. Great! But I couldn't figure out how to get into the line as all the entrances seemed to be blocked off. I then looked at all the ticket windows and they said closed. Finally, someone appeared and told me the cable car was closed due to technical difficulties.
I have one last chance tomorrow, depending on the weather, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. Seems I may have to visit the top of the mountain on my next visit.
Below is a picture taken from the foot of the mountain where the cable car leaves from. (I should have probably taken one of the closed ticket desks as that would have been more appropriate, but I didn't think of it at the time).
You will notice how my crap camera has managed to take a perfect photo of the trees in the foreground and leave the whole of Cape Town out of focus. Pretty impressive if you ask me. I don't have my proper camera here until next week (as didn't want to risk taking it to Nigeria) and don't have any photo editing software on my work computer, so this is the best I can do.
Pretty poor really, but given the run of bad luck I'm having with this mountain, it's about par for the course.
