Table Mountain Cable Car & Kirstenbosch Gardens

Dominique, Matt and I spent Sunday on our own, riding the Table Mountain Cable Car and then spending most of the day at the gorgeous Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.

Table Mountain looms over Cape Town at just over 3500 feet.  There are lots of hiking trails on the mountain, accessible either by walking up or taking a 5 minute cable car ride. We like cable cars, so opted for the ride.  Signal Mountain lies between Seaport (the neighborhood in which we were staying) and the cable car tramway station. The hotel shuttle had to take a somewhat round-about route since the 17km Gun Run trail running event included portions of Signal Mountain and had closed several streets.

The top of Table Mountain offers stunning 360 degree views – assuming you can see anything at all. Remember those fogs that doomed the Cape Point Lighthouse? The same phenomenon occurs here, and a low lying cloud completely shrouded the top of the mountain on our visit.

Views were good from the embarkation station…

…but completely vanished as we rode the rotating 50 person gondola up the cliff.

The top of Table Mountain was cold, damp, slippery and ghostly.

I love the brilliant slash of color these chatty Red-Winged Starlings display in flight.

We didn’t stay on top for long, since everything (especially the coffee shops) was very crowded, despite the weather.

After descending the cable car, we caught a taxi to Kirstenbosch National Botanic Garden, which is located on the lower slopes of the east side of Table Mountain. 

The Kirstenbosch estate is huge: just under 1300 acres, including 89 acres of “cultivated gardens,” with the remainder protected as a nature reserve.

The Dutch East India Company owned the area in the 1700s and stripped it of timber (mostly for shipbuilding). After the British took over in 1806, the land passed into British hands and was operated as a farm and vineyard for most of the century. In 1895, Cecil Rhodes bought the land to protect the eastern slope of Table Mountain from further development, and he left the property to the nation in 1902. In 1913, it became a botanic garden “for the cultivation and study of the indigenous plants of South Africa.”

What I particularly liked about this botanic garden was its focus on native plants and its sense of wildness.  Although the private owners added a few buildings and some areas with cultivated plants (like Cecil Rhodes’ avenue of camphor trees), the 29 gardens are dominated by vegetation from the “Cape Floral Kingdom,” including the Fynbos (“fine bush”) biome.

This tiny area of South Africa has the richest diversity of any floral kingdom on earth: covering only 90,000 square kilometers (0.04% of the earth’s surface) nearly 9000 species of flowering plants (3% of all vegetation) are native here, with more than ⅔ of these species unique to this region. However, many species are found today in gardens and garden shops around the world – common varieties like iris, daisies, lilies, freesias and pelargoniums (to name a few) all originated in the fynbos.

 The cultivated portion of the reserve is made up of 29 gardens, connected through a network of walking paths.  As a conservation garden, it has very few “specimen” plants, focusing instead on more than 1100 species of indigenous plants. 

At Genevieve’s suggestion, we were dropped off at Gate 2, which is about halfway up the relatively sleep slope.

Not far from Gate 2 is a kiosk dedicated to the Fynbos, which features a changing display of Fynbos species currently in bloom.

Birdlife is abundant, with human habituates in the most frequented areas and less common species in the less developed/denser gardens. Dominique is an avid birder, and was able to identify all of the birds we spotted – but I only managed to get pictures of some.

We encountered many of these noisy, gregarious (and unappreciated) birds during our visit to southern Africa, but at Kirstenbosch we could get close enough to appreciate their beautiful plumage.

The bouncy Boomslang Walkway let us wander along the top of the tree canopy, which was noisy with birdlife. (The boomslang is a shy, but highly venomous arboreal snake.)

We particularly liked the variety and extravagant blooms of the many varieties of protea.

The avenue of Camphor Trees planted by Cecil Rhodes.

We looped back to the Tea Room near Gate 2 for a bite of lunch.

After lunch, we worked our way downslope towards the Gate 1 entry.

The gardeners here created a special “bird of paradise” variety in honor of Nelson Mandela.

The Gate 1 visitors center has a display of bonsai grown from Strangler Figs and Wild Olives, varieties I’d never seen as bonsai before –  intriguing and unusual shapes.

We taxied back to the Winchester in mid-afternoon and took a couple of hours off. I made a quick visit to the park to figure out the strange sculpture we’d been puzzling over from our window. This is what we saw from the hotel…

… and this is the view from the path by the sea.

We ended the day with another dinner in the marvelous Shoreditch restauraunt. Standout dishes during our stay included mushrooms au gratin; cauliflower roasted and seasoned with mango acha spice; crusty aubergine skewer; roasted cabbage; and (according to Dom and Matt) lamb riblets with chakalaka seasoning and a biltong sampler tray. A great chef can make the most dull-sounding vegetables sing with flavor! Their breakfast granola was also outstanding – a very unusual blend of seeds, nuts, coconut and spices.

After dinner, we retired to our rooms to pack and prepare for next day’s departure to our first safari camp: Idube, in Sabi Sands.