Top of the Table - and another lower one

The cable car spins round on its way up to the top of Table Mountain. The view from the top is quite stunning

After another fruitless trip to buy our tickets for the train to Johannesburg, we decided to head off to the Waterfront and take a tour bus around the city. The highlight of the day was definitely heading on the cable car to the top of Table Mountain.

What a stunning place, 1 kilometer above the city spread before us below. For anyone visiting CT, this is a must-do and I can not recommend it enough. It was relief to be away from the heat of town trolling round town on the open topper actually, and even more of a relief as the temps dropped by at least 10 degrees on top of the mountain.

A leisurely trip along the coast through some of the most expensive beach front housing on earth and one of the more exclusive resorts (so exclusive we skipped them) took us back to the Waterfront and back to our hotel for a well deserved food stop at the local Pick 'n' Pay - we were running low on soft drinks and choc and supermarkets apparently close on Sunday (this wasn't actually the case but we weren't to know).

After an hour or so reading in the hotel we headed to a restaurant called Mama Africa's, as recommended in our tourist guide, and if the amount of tourists crammed there is to go by,. Most of the other guides too.

I think I would have enjoyed this place more had we not been completely spoilt by Nona’s the night before. There was nothing wrong with at all. The cocktails, which were high quality and generous in size, were £2.00 a pop, so the relatively disappointment we experienced with the food was partly made by the liquid refreshment. But the service became ridiculously slow as the evening progressed (45 minutes between main course and dessert), the desert itself, a malva pudding, which in my case was super-bland and the music, which was deafening - and we were tabled about as far away from the band as could be. I'm not too snobby about being a tourist - I am one - but I felt this was far to "corporate tourist mill Africa" for my liking. I had a pretty nice Cape Malay curry which was both spicy and sweet and apparently, according to our friends in Pretoria I spoke to about it later, seemed quite like the real deal.

We had an early start on Sunday, so by 2230 we were back at the hotel and I read Christopher Fowler's marvelously easy to absorb autobiog, Paperboy, while Mrs DD slept like a wee child.