Day Trips - 2 - Lion's Head, Signal Hill & Table Mountain

We planned to go up Table Mountain by cable car early on a Sunday afternoon - but we were thwarted! Although it was a hot, clear day all around Tafelberg, the cable cars weren't running due to strong winds & dense cloud cover sweeping over the table top. So we thought that we would walk up the nearby Lion's Head, expecting an "unstrenuous hike" as described in our "Rough Guide" - whoever wrote that had obviously only gone up halfway! We would describe it as a tough scramble, both up to & down from the very top. There was a reward for our efforts though, because the views were stunning on all sides. We looked out across: Signal Hill, the entire city, the harbour area & over Robben Island to the north; the Atlantic seaboard down to Cape Point to the south & west; Table Mountain to the east. In fact, we could see that the cable cars had started to run by the time we were ready to clamber back down. So, late in the afternoon, after a trip along Signal Hill for an ice-cream, we finally stepped into one of the revolving cabin that twirl you to the top of the famous landmark. To our delighted surprise , we found that we only had to pay half-price by going up late in the day! Having baked in the heat all day, it was a strange but not unwelcome sensation to find ourselves in a chilling fog. Sometimes the fog was so thick that we could hardly see a few feet in front of us, but then the wind would blow the clouds over to reveal the sea & the city dizzily far below. Moments later we were shrouded in fog again. It was eerie. The most amazing experience was to look down as the clouds tumbled over the cliffs under our feet like a huge frothing waterfall.

We were able to stay up on the table top long enough to watch the sun sink down into the Ocean (our 1st sunset view, since we are normally on the eastern side of the mountain) before the wind picked up speed again. A warning siren heralded a mass evacuation. We piled into the last cable car down as the city lit up beneath us - beautiful.