Cape Town - Day 5

We slept in until around 8 am, which felt amazing.  I caught up on some e-mails and Jen monkeyed around with some photos for a while, then we walked north up the street about 1 mile to Bootlegger's - a breakfast place that Gow recommended.

Jen Gow lives in paradise.  She overlooks the ocean from a cliff-side condo (with what is effectively a private beach below).  And it's not just a "cliff," it's enormous, granite formations with rounded edges that form incredible shapes and configurations - festooned with tropical flowers of every color you can imagine from beach to mountain top, which are interrupted only by the roadway and generally just grow over or around houses.  It's sunny.  The air is fresh, moist and slightly salty.  The temperature is perfect - and is almost always perfect.

Bootlegger's was delicious.  I had banana bread french toast topped with bacon - which was about $4.10 USD.  That's insane.  Jen Gow lives in paradise.

We came back to Gow's, hung out with Deacon and caught up on some more work.  Around 3 pm we ventured south on the road toward Camp's Bay, stopping at the first place that appeared to offer food and drink: the Bungalow, which appeared to be affiliated with "Glen's Country Club" - though there was no golf course in site.  Apparently it is more of a country club for lawn bowling (similar to bocce) and soccer.  It overlooks the ocean and rests on a wider, flatter plain of land closer to the water.  We had some delicious savignon blanc, fresh calimari, tempura shrimp and "chips" (fries).  It was quite perfect.

(This one's for you, Dad!)

Around 5, we headed back up the hill to Gow's and went down to the beach below her building, sitting on a huge granite boulder on the sand.  We watched the sun go down as a few dogs from the building ran around on the sand.  One guy had two Portuguese water dogs - one old and one young.  The young one ran around endlessly, while the old one just focused on keeping its legs moving forward.

Gow got home and met us at the beach, concerned we were going to get locked out due to the nightly power outage for "Loadshedding".  Each night there are scheduled shutdowns of power throughout the city for ~2 hours so the government doesn't breach it's power supply contract to Botswana. We sat in the dark and enjoyed a delicious glass of South African wine and marveled at what such a thing would be like if we were in the U.S.

We then headed toward the downtown on the other side of the mountain to South China Dim Sum, which was an amazing little restaurant.  Probably the best dim sum I've ever had - and a delicious bottle of local wine too.

(Jen L. needed a chopstick tutorial from Jen G.)

After dinner we wandered down the street a bit and went into a bar that had some awesome live music toward the door.  There was a young guy that was killer on the saxophone - backed up by two guys playing xylophone-like instruments, one of which had bass tones.  We had some big Windhoek draft beers - which were $3 USD.  I could get used to these prices...