If you’re wondering know why we chose the Table View area when we moved to Cape Town, you don’t have to ‘wander’ too far (cheesy, I know) – the area’s name gives it away. This photo my mom took a few weeks ago, when spring was first making its presence felt, shows just how beautiful that ‘Table View’ really is…
Or how about this one, taken while having dins outdoors at our local St Elmo’s on the beach, which is just 5 minutes down the road…
Something we didn’t factor in when we decided to live this side of the city? The traffic. It’s gridlocked in morning and evening peak hours, which means you need to leave super early or really late if you’re travelling by car to avoid it. This is a pic hubby took in the middle of winter one evening on his way home from work)…
Beautiful, but eerie, no? And even at 6am/ 6pm, there’s a fair deal of traffic on the roads.
But all is not lost, thank to the MyCiti bus. This isn’t your average bus or anything like the Gautrain in Gauteng. No Sirree. It has its own special pink bus lanes that it zooms along on, passing the bumper-to-bumper traffic. It’s affordable, sticks to its schedule, gives me the chance to not only catch up on some sleep (most people nod off during the 40-minute or so journey from Table View to Civic Centre), but also – probably more importantly – to keep up the weekend hiking high by slotting a bit of exercise into my daily routine, as walking to and from the closest station to work and home is about 2km per day in total.
But we don’t just use the bus for the ‘daily commute’ – today we took our motorbike in for a service and used the opportunity to get around town without setting foot in a car. We caught the train to Kalk Bay, walked around in the sunshine exploring the many book stores and gazing at the gorgeous baked treats on offer everywhere, got our caffeine fix through one of the best milkshake-style iced coffees I’ve ever had, imbibed a beer at the Brass Bell while watching the crashing waves, caught the train back to town, then used the MyCiti bus to get to the nearest station home 🙂 What fun we had!
Watching the crashing waves while waiting for our drinks to arrive at ‘Beach at the Bell’:
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that we really enjoy this type of day trip, as we had a ‘public transport day’ when we first moved down to Cape Town almost a year ago (click here for a reminder of the two of us on the train to Simon’s Town).
This is me in a typical MyCiti station on the weekend – not crowded at ALL:
So yes. Explore your city – treat it as a tourist would. If you live in CT, you don’t even need a car to do so! 🙂
Thank you for finally visiting our lovely city again, summer – we’ll be taking many more of these trips as a result. Watch this space!
Rambling Litchi 