Day 373 / 138

Date: 20 April 2023
Sleeping location: Grosvenor Guesthouse, Simon’s Town, South Africa
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 82 / 23526 / 8689
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 400 / 224200 / 106200
Murderers: 0
Day in three words: A miserable entrance

We didn’t really have a proper selection of breakfast food in so we just had a weird smorgasbord of leftover pizza, pocket eggs, slightly musty fruit and other random things. Even so it was better than a few of the breakfasts we’d had (6/10).

The weather wasn’t particularly welcoming, all low cloud and drizzle, and the allegedly safest/best route into town was boring as hell, all housing estates, warehouses and big open grassy spaces of nothing. On the plus side the road had a big shoulder and was quiet, on the minus side we had on and off cloudbursts to add to the fun. What a way this would be to finish my journey - I was glad I’d chosen the Cape of Good Hope rather than Cape Town itself as the end point. After 25km the road became busier in Kuilsriver; we had already been through a place called Croydon earlier in the day but this felt like it would be the Croydon to Cape Town’s London. So far there had been no murderers and no real sense of danger, and there was even a fancy patisserie for top up breakfast.

After that the road stayed rubbish, but instead of being boring it was now actively unpleasant, two lanes of busy traffic with no shoulder. I began to question if the biggest danger here was actually the traffic, not the murderers. Eventually we turned off this to take the M5 road that had been recommended by Chris in Barrydale, but that was actually a motorway so instead we took some smaller roads that turned out to be much nicer. By now Maggie was squeaking like mad as all of her lube had washed off on the rain, and I was applying water from my bottles to stop the squeaks rather than actually dealing with the problem.

We decompressed over lunch in a cafe which served a nice veggie wrap and for some reason* had a picture of Derry on the wall that I recognised but took me ages (and a Google image search) to figure out. 

After this we had more of the same, narrow roads through the city with lots of traffic but no murderers, until we finally reached the coast at Muizenberg. This was a quaint little town on the beautiful coast road, but there were still too many cars to enjoy it. Gradually the traffic began to thin out and the last 10km were good, and in fact the only good part of the day. What an inglorious way to enter Cape Town. Towards the end of the day a guy on a shiny new road bike in all the gear went past us on a small climb. With a sense of professional pride I went after him and squeaky Maggie and I held his wheel easily. The poor guy must have been very confused hearing this tortured noise follow him like a vengeful ghost**.

Simon’s Town is a nice little place, with old steep cobbled streets and great views back over False Bay,  that also happens to contain South Africa’s main naval base. Our guesthouse was up on the hillside and had wonderful views over town and back to the city. After a short break we had a walk around town followed by a huge seafood platter at “Fran’s”, which arrived suspiciously quickly but was tasty and did not give us food poisoning. 

It’s difficult to get my brain to reflect on the journey. It just feels like the end of another day, with another day to come tomorrow. I suppose it doesn't really work like that and my feelings will come out when they want to. The last couple of weeks have been lovely but mostly easy, and I wonder if the lack of struggle and adventure has made me forget about the struggle and adventure that led to this point. However, I did spend 90 minutes unable to sleep because of a few mosquitos buzzing around, which was an appropriate activity for the last night of my African journey. 

*Well, an actual reason, the owner is Northern Irish