75 Steps to a Largely Successful Trip to Cape Town: Enjoying Small Victories

Meet travel buddy at PC office. Celebrate the beginning of vacation!
Get ride from office to Pioneer Mall to get food for the bus
Armed with food supplies, get a ride to Cafe What
Successfully eat lunch (vacations should always start with nachos and milkshakes)
Walk to border gate (note: get a ride next time)
Pass through customs without argument or issue
Locate and board taxi to Bloemfontein and then wait and stress about missing the bus and wait some more
Actually make the trip to Bloem (bonus points for making a spontaneous friendship bracelet for the little girl sitting behind you. Bonus points for spotting the ostriches grazing in the field with the egrets)
Arrive in town 15 minutes before your bus leaves and try not to panic
Hire a taxi at special price to floor it to the Intercape station (curse red light gods for giving you not only consecutive red lights but also a passing fire truck)
Arrive at bus with 4 minutes to spare. Make two separate trips into the office to finalize paperwork. Board bus 1 minute past time. Pull out of the station. Relax- you made it!
Ride overnight to Cape Town. (+3 for sleeping on the bus, -5 for not sleeping on the bus, +4 for appropriately timed dramatic music to catch the first sunlight on clouds and for the beginning of the descent into a super epic valley capped with clouds, +1 for arriving early, side quest: spot the ocean for the first time in 6 months!)
Arrive in Cape Town!
Get an overly expensive taxi to the hostel that includes good pointers about the city
Check in to hostel
Awkwardly meet asleep male roommates
Shower! (+1 point for each layer of dirt shed. Ignore signs about non-existent buckets left over from the drought.)
Have a map session that ends in hunger and a quest for breakfasts
Actually meet roommates (Canadian, much cooler awake)
Breakfast quest. Pick, walk, locate, eat.
Wander (found: Green Market, Flower Market, Bo Kaap, some souvenirs bought)
Reluctant but highly successful nap
Swim in the pool (make friends with robotic pool cleaner, name it Squid)
Shower again. That never gets old.
Walk down the street to Tiger’s Milk and fight indecision. Get a table. Find out that the whole neighborhood has no power and that the kitchen can’t make everything. Decide not to care. Order from the super cute waiter. Obtain cocktails, a burger, and tacos.
Go on a disappointing quest for dessert.
Ignore the wind and roll with the power outage. Bonus points for socializing. Hang out in the common area and play cards with three new German friends.
Go to bed, finally.
Breakfast at the hostel. More than enough chocolate croissants and fruit to go around.
Walk down the road to find the stop for the hop-on hop-off bus. Accidentally walk past it. Make a fast u-turn when the bus drives past and sprint three blocks to catch it. Miss it by one intersection.
Wait for the next one at the newly located stop.
Get on bus! Pick up a map, plug headphones into the commentary, and enjoy the ride. First round- bottom of Table Mountain Tramway, over the hill to Camps Bay, past rows of super ritzy beach side apartments (wonder how much we would have make to afford one), stadium from the World Cup and the home of the vuvuzela (if you don’t know what it is, look it up), see lighthouse.
Disembark at Victoria & Albert Waterfront. Have an attack of overwhelm. This is quite probably the largest mall you’ve ever been in and is nothing like the hut in the mountains that you have spent the last year in. It’s too much to take in and after walking around for two hours, decide that it’s so big that your feet might fall off before you cover it all.
Admit that the food is much better here and enjoy it throughly! Get smoothies as a necessary part of lunch.
Get on the little tour boat that your tickets to the hop-on hop-off bus gives you access to. Enjoy a half an hour ride around the harbor with interesting commentary. See fur seals.
Get back on the bus. This time take the blue line instead of the red. Drive all the way around the base of Table Mountain.
Get off and have a mini bus tour of South Africa’s oldest wine region. See the oldest winery in the country. Learn that Groot means big in Dutch.
Get back on blue line.
Drive through a shanty town that houses 30,000 people in about 4 football fields worth of space. Develop a sudden hatred of the houses across the street that have their own private tennis courts.
Pass through Hout Bay, a beautiful little bay with a mostly empty that seems largely forgotten by most tourists.
Return to Cape Town exhausted. Switch buses to get back to the hostel.
Go swimming in the pool again.
You signed up for an “African Dinner”. Find out that really is a stew made pretty much of the same stuff you have been eating for the last year but with better spices. Make friends with the two Brazilian girls at your table.
Bed!
Get up at 3:30 in the morning and attempt not to wake roommates as you head out. Meet a few others at the hostel bar at 4 am. Get an Uber and as a group head up to the trail head at Lion’s Head. Wish that you brought hiking boots instead of sneakers on this trip. Start walking in the pitch black. Get to know your fellow hikers from the hostel. Enjoy the views of city lights below at you climb.
Reach the top of Lion’s Head about 20 minutes before sunrise. Take several dozen photos of the sunrise over Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain.
Slip and sprain your ankle in the way down. Pull out the ankle wrap that you’ve carried in your bag since last year to the day when you sprained the other ankle and couldn’t walk for a month. This sprain is not nearly that bad. Thank your lucky stars individually and by name.
Finish the hike. Get a ride. Enjoy a well deserved breakfast back at the hostel. Eat more chocolate croissants than you need because you’re on vacation.
Take a shower to get less sweaty and gross.
Head back out. Get back on the hop-on hop-off bus and ride it all the way around. Go back V&A. Get smoothies. Go shopping. Find all the necessary pieces to a craft project for cheap and all in the same place. Get funny looks from the employees as you spend half an hour sitting on the floor of the shop rummaging through bins and finding exactly the pieces you want. All 27 of them. Chess set in progress… (already had a few)
Get on the blue line again and ride all the way around the mountain again. Get off at Hout Bay. Walk along the pier and unsuccessfully try to remember the theme song to Pirates of the Caribbean. (This will bother you for the next two days.)
Get lunch at the schmancy seafood place. Sit outside on the second floor balcony overlooking the beach. Order seafood and drinks and feel like real adults. Realize how much you missed smoked salmon and start thinking about how much you’ll eat when you get back to the states in a year.
Go to the beach and stick your feet in the ocean!!
Back out quickly when your feet freeze instantly. Remember that this water is coming straight from Antarctica.
Return to Cape Town. Switch buses and take the yellow line. Drive around downtown and see the castle. Learn about some fascinating and depressing history of Cape Town and South Africa.
Return to hostel. Go swimming again.
Go to a NY pizza place down the street with classic rock and pepperoni pizza. Enjoy it like you have never enjoyed pizza before.
Go to bed early. You’ve been up since 3:30 am.
Breakfast.
Start a twenty minute walk well over an hour early. Walk downtown and arrive at the meeting spot for today’s your bus. Get smoothies. Again. Wait for bus.
Get on bus. Not cutting it close this time. Comfy seats. Funny guide on the intercom. AC. Good start.
Drive out of Cape Town. Drive down to a peninsula. Arrive at Cape Point.
Climb up to the old lighthouse and enjoy the fog. Learn about the history of ships passing the area (and those that didn’t make it past and shipwrecked).
Hike as a group along the cliffs and beaches. Arrive at the Cape of Good Hope, the most SW point in Africa. Get obligatory photo of the sign.
Back on the bus to Boulders Beach. Penguins! (Note: African Penguins are the third smallest in the world. This does not make them any less smelly.)
Buy penguin socks. Why not?
Take bus back to V&A. Get dinner before returning to the hostel.
Slow morning of packing and getting ready to head out. Go to wrap and smoothie place to get lunch for the bus. Get smoothies. One last time to enjoy having ice before you return to the land of no electricity.
Avoid over expensive taxi and decide to just walk to the bus terminal in the morning. Get lost and thank your smarts. You guys left yourselves two hours to walk a half an hour distance. You have plenty of time to get unlost. Get on the bus. Choose good seats (not the only empty ones left this time). Settle in and get ready for a really long day.
Enjoy the ride for the first few hours. Decide to enjoy it less when you get basically no sleep and arrive back at Bloemfontein at 2 am. You knew it was coming but that doesn’t make it any more fun.
Wait for 4 hours in the bus terminal (+1 for it being safer and far less sketchy than you feared it might be, -1 for still not getting any sleep)
Get a 4+1 (sedan, 4 passengers + the driver, most similar to an American taxi) to the taxi rank and find the taxi (van) back to Maseru. Stand for an hour waiting for the driver to arrive. Realize that you cannot find any breakfast or coffee. Get in taxi and try to fall asleep on your backpacks during the 2 hour wait. Definitely fall asleep during the ride and miss most of the ride back to Lesotho.
Go through customs- no problems. Hurray!
Welcome back to the Kingdom in the Sky.
Go to your travel buddy’s house and sleep for eleven hours straight to recover. Spend another three days actually getting home. Celebrate the awesome trip and collapse exhausted on your bed with your cats. You successfully vacationed. Now take a nap and be grateful that you don’t have to go to work for another month because it’s summer break. Start planning your next trip 😎