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Showing posts from December, 2005

There's still crime in the city, but it's good to be free

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Before dinner last night I built an appetite by climbing Table Mountain, which is both the symbol of Cape Town and its literal heart: the city encircles the mountain, which rises 1000 steep metres from the sea to an almost perfectly flat top. From the lower cable car station, it's theoretically a 2.5-hour hike: I'm pleased to report that I ascended in just under half that time. There's life in the ol' leg muscles yet, even though they were already battered from cycling 50 hilly, rainy K from Simon's Town to Cape Point and back, a few days ago. The mountain claims several lives every year, and you're not really supposed to climb alone, but I took a straightforward route up, figuring that if Reinhold Messner could summit Everest solo without oxygen during monsoon season, I could conquer Table Mountain singlehanded. As I reached the tabletop, the clouds that often line it - the mountain's famous tablecloth - were just beginning to arrive, so I only got twenty m