The 14th November brought about the truck change over day so I was no longer on BURT (officially anyway). I spent the next few days in and around Cape Town at Simon's Town (lovely beach area), Table Mountain, the city centre and an awesome penguin colany. The train journey into Table Mountain was always an interesting one, with folk singing gospel songs, playing guitars, dancing and people walking along every two minutes with goods to sell. The townships along the way were also fascinating and it was very very sad to see that people still live in such terrible conditions in this day in age. (I met a guy on the plane to Jo'burg who informed me that he had a maid from a township working for his middle class family, he was paying her minimum wage of 100 rand (£10) a day for her work - bare in mind that South Africa has similar prices to that of the UK and she had a family of 8 to feed!)

Table mountain is definitely high on my list of the most beautiful places I'd seen whilst on the trip but one of which, in the end, brought about the most fear, enjoyment and exhaustion for me - two climbing days in a row. I learnt so much on even the first day's climb about what I should not do when I go climbing for example climb a mountain in 40 degree heat in the middle of the day without enough water to complete the climb, climb with a huge backpack on, follow another person up a route because you think their going the right way, leave little time to complete a route, leave without a torch, miss the last train - and all this wasn't even on the day of the BIG fall. Anyway, I wouldn't have changed not doing that climb for the world, it was one of the most incredible routes I had done, with great exposure and having been so late on the climb we got a sunset that some people will only ever see on TV. After all that adventure on the first day of table mountain I was eager to do by far the hardest trad route than I'd ever done before beside where I'd been climbing that day. Boy what a challenge the hard route turned out to be. The very basics of the story was that I took at least a 10 metre fall swing which wasn't pleasant by any means and which left me in a bit of an emotional state!!!

The next morning I left, saying goodbye to the good friends that I had made over the past six weeks.

The plane rides to my next destination (all three of them) followed suit with previous flights on this trip where I chatted to interesting people and enjoyed watching the movies and eating the food the airlines had to offer.