Table Mountain From The Car

Some blogs have confusing, technical or arty-farty titles. Others are more empirical.

Table Mountain From The Car features a daily photograph of Table Mountain, taken from a car. Which is brilliant.

 tmot

There now, that was pretty straightforward, wasn’t it?

EDIT: TMFTC appears to be the brainchild of Just Plain Ron.

What a difference a day made…

Twenty-four little hours.
Brought the smoke and the fires.
Where there used to be green.


Before and after – The Devils Peak Fire

Houses in High Cape and Vredehoek (where I used to live) were evacuated at 1 o’clock this morning as high winds threatened drive the fire into residential areas. Spectacular iol pictures.

Today, it’s just a matter of damping down what’s left of the vegetation and  putting out the fires in the kloofs on the Groote Schuur Estate. Just for an idea of scale, those three “little” fires you can see up at the top of the mountain have flames up to five storeys high according to the Cape Town Fire Department spokesman on the radio. S’big, then.

Cape Town sunset

It’s not difficult to take good photographs in Cape Town. Decent subject matter is nearly always available, all you have to do is point and shoot. But because of that, the bar is raised and because good is the norm, exceptional becomes the goal.
Having only wandered outside to fix a drainpipe (what else do you do at 8pm on a Monday evening?), I grabbed the camera, pointed and shooted, Micklethwait-style. Result:

I don’t claim that all these Sunsets & Skyscapes are exceptional, but I do think they’re mostly at least good. However, as I said, I can’t really take a huge amount of credit for that. Even the sky seems so much more photogenic over here.

Postcards from heaven

People keep coming on here and referring to this big storm which swept through the Western Cape last week and should really have ruined our holiday. To be honest, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that we kinda missed it, leaving us mildly bemused by all the talk of holiday wreckage.
Actually, Arniston was beautiful, sunny and lovely, as this Flickr set will surely testify. Oh sure, it rained and was a bit windy as we drove back to Cape Town, but it really didn’t seem anything too hectic. And it certainly wasn’t anything like the August storm.
So yes, we had a great break. Thanks for asking.

In fact, Friday dawned so beautifully that we felt an assault on the Lion’s Head would be “a good idea”. For those uninitiated in the ways of the Mother City, the Lion’s Head is the (only ever so) slightly smaller lump of rock on the right as you look at the big flat lump of rock.
There’s no cable car here – it’s a tough rocky scramble, scrambling up tough rocks, with your only reward the stunning 360° panoramic views across Table Mountain, Cape Town and the Atlantic Seaboard. It was a hot day and hard work, but at least there were no scorpions in our beds.
Although that was probably mainly due to the lack of beds rather than anything else.

    
More pictures on Flickr

Tomorrow, we head inland to Worcester and Goudini Spa, where we will relax, recover and rejuvenate in the more seasonable heatwave predicted towards the end of the week. Tough life, hey?