Table Mountain stands sentry over Cape Town. It is majestic and is now the newest member of the “New 7 Natural Wonders of the World”. Who knew there was a new “New”? Turns out we have now been to five of the sites on the list. We never intentionally plan our travels so that we can check off places on any list but we do seem to end up at these glorious places.
Table Mountain has a cableway to the top. There are cableways and then there is Table Mountain’s cableway. The length of the cable is 1,200m and each car has a rotating floor so all 65 passengers get a 360 view as it travels up the face of the mountain. As the door closes you are told to step away from the window and let go of the braces. Counterintuitive to anyone with good sense as doing so requires a sheer act of faith for some of us whose knuckles were already turning white by the time the door closed.
As spectacular as the view is looking out away from the mountain, the view as the car rotates towards the mountain is breathtaking. The last 60 feet run vertically to the face of the cliff. For one seemingly endless moment, you get an idea of what it must be like climbing the face of El Capitan. Terrifying! Stepping out of the car at the top, I was certain we had made it to Heaven – both because we were finally safe with solid ground beneath us and because we were in the clouds. Table Mountain is so massive that it captures the moisture coming off the ocean and turns it into swirling clouds of mist and fog that hug the ground and spill down the sides of the mountain, all in constant motion.
The mountain is sandstone with a core of granite – old stone. They say the mountain is six times older than the Himalayas. Basically flat on top, the habitat is low shrub covered with protea. Because of the number of visitors who make this trek daily, there is a beautiful stone trail that circles the perimeter of the top. Precarious lookouts are located all along the way. The hike takes about an hour for a sighted person.
Bert and Bill are a tightly choreographed team. Like in Cappadocia, Bert leads Bill single file on the trail, speaking every step, “Step up, step down, step a little to right, don’t stray left!” Only when the trail was full of water in a few areas did they have to just slog through it. The occasional swear word let us know that they were going to have wet feet. Walking ahead of them, I was cognizant that every single step I took required my eyes constantly scanning the trail for the next step while simultaneously scanning ahead to plot the next half dozen steps. Bill relied solely on Bert’s steady and accurate descriptions.
All along the way, the clouds and mist circled around us, periodically opening to blue sky and stunning views across the mountain top and down to the bay. Infamous Robben Island was visible in the middle of the bay.
Feeling less than eager to get back into the cable car, I reassured myself as the doors closed that thousands of people take the cable car up and down Table Mountain. Incidents are rare, maybe nonexistent. As we started down, the floor began to rotate and the car began to descend, and then both suddenly stopped! We were suspended vertically to the cliff face and not moving! My first thought was, “Really, is this it? Is this how it ends and not because the mokoro overturned in the Delta and a hippo bit me in half?” How disappointing.
Everyone collectively stopped breathing and all 65 of us in the car began looking around with that questioning expression of, “Is this normal?” After 5 or 10,000 minutes (hard to tell when you are not breathing) of walkie-talkie back and forth between our operator and the folks in the control tower, our car lurched back up to the top.
We managed to pile out without shoving and pushing one another in a race to get out of the car and waited. As the time passed I begin reading the fine print of the brochure for anything describing another way down the mountain. I was thinking Kevin could carry Bill on his shoulders like he does little Henry. The poor woman next to Kevin was having to breathe into a paper bag because she was hyperventilating. I was close!
Twenty minutes later we were told everything was fine and to get back into the car. It was one of those pivotal moments where you either follow blindly or you take bold action and go with your instincts. We followed blindly, except Bert did have the courage to ask the guy as only Bert can do, “So, what happened? To which he replied with a little too much force, “Lady, it is fine. A small issue and now it is fixed.” He sounded to me like he was really saying, “Lady, don’t you dare go crazy on me now. I have had enough of you tourists and your fear of heights. Don’t come up here if you can’t take it. Get over it and get in the car.”
Yup . . . I’m pretty sure that is what he was thinking.
Fortunately, we made it down just as the last bus off the lower mountain pulled away without us. We taxied it instead and made straight away for cocktails on Camps Beach as the sun dropped into the ocean. Here we come hippos!
