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Well arrived in Cape Town settled into our hostel and went out to the deck to see the amazing view of table mountain. Cape Town was a very pretty city and a real backpacking hub two thirds of people walking on long street must have been backpackers. We went to the markets and picked up some bargains although they made you work for the discount! We then took a walk down onto the waterfront and mixed with the wealthy tourists! That didn't last too long as prices were almost double down there although the restaurants were still good value I had excellent calamari and drinks for under a fiver. When we were I also went Sand Boarding in a place called Atlantis was really good some massive dunes and got the hang of it fairly quickly although still ended up with a face full of Sand. I also happened to be sandboarding with some guy called Tim who I found out was the world champion tri-athlete from the UK named Tim Don and some other guys all of who had qualified for the next world championships! We also walked to the nearest beach which happened to be 3 hours away and later we found out it only costs 5 rand in a taxi bus which is about 30p! To add to the hiking we decided to head up Table Mountain and do some abseiling off it, the worlds highest commercial abseil! However when things go wrong they really go wrong. We started walking up on a fairly easy path, we then came to a sign one saying Plettenklip gorge the other saying lower cable way, we already knew the abseil was over beside the cable way so we though that path would be best, so we walked until we came to another sign and it said Inde Verda path or something similar I have photos of it, but below this sign was a nice little disclaimer saying that thins path should not be attempted by inexperienced hikers, as the path is difficult and navigation on the path at times is difficult and below this use at own risk! however everything in SA says use at your own risk and i wouldn't call myself inexperienced at hiking so we went on, the climbing was more like rock climbing than trail walking at times you needed to find foot holes and places to grab onto in order to get up but we managed that fine and the path at this stage was fairly clear so we continued. However somewhere on up we lost the trail, I mean there were no markings anywhere so we continued up as it seemed a good bet that we would hit the trail again as it snaked up the mountain, but climbing up and up we got to about 50 metres below the top when it came to a part we needed to go around so Catherine and Rachel sat down while I went to see which way was best to go round so went left first and was faced with a vertical cliff then went right again the same! so the girls weren't happy! Stuck up a mountain and having just missed our time slot to do the abseil we sat down and cat was trying to convince me to call the rescue services I had to explain that helicopters can't land on the side of mountains and that we would have to walk down anyway. So we started our precarious decline I say that because if we slipped more than 5 metres we would have fallen off vertical cliff edges about a hundred feet or so! Fun! But we had to slide down on all fours at times and grip onto branches and grass clumps sometimes but we eventually found the path again and continued down the mountain to the cable car where people getting off the nice air conditioned cable car looked at my now black t-shirt and bleeding arms with a strange glare! We went back then because we had booked our Robben island tour (The place Mandela and other politicians was held during apartheid) but it was pretty cool. I think thats about it for Cape Town
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