a trip to capetown

Hi, what a crazy few weeks, culminating in a trip to Capetown for our nephew's wedding (Congrats Rich and Annie!)

There is so much to show you, and so much to catch up on here, so in the meantime I am just going to give you a peek at one of our favourite spots in Capetown. Rhodes Memorial is built halfway up the slopes of Lion's head, to the right of table mountain.
If you look at the mountains in this Google Earth image, and imagine they are a lizard with the tip of the tail on the upper left, curling down and round , back up to the nose in the upper right, the tail is signal hill, the body is table mountain and as it curves up to the right the head is lions head. Where Lion's Head forms the lizard's nose, there is a lighter brown patch on the map, and if you look just to the right and below that, there is a whitish dot, which is Rhodes Memorial perched on the side of the mountain there, over looking a huge part of the city.

It consists of a "c" shaped building of giant granite pillars,
in the centre of which is a huge bust of Cecil John Rhodes. He was one of those nasty Colonial Heroes i was ranting about recently. A man of great vision, who dreamed of building a railway from the Cape to Cairo, he was also a ruthless exploiter. Coming down from the centre of the pillared building is a sweeping staircase, flanked by huge bronze sculptures of lions, and in the centre at the bottom is a huge high granite plinth with a magnificent statue of a man on a horse, looking out over the city.

As we left the sun was going down, and the rays through the huge old trees were lovely.
This tree sparkling in the sun is one of the rare silver trees, a member of the protea family and indigenous to the Cape town area. They have hairy greyish leaves which literally look silver in the right light.

And I'm afraid that's that, because Google informs me that my Picassa Web Album is now full, and i can't blog any more photos till i buy more space, or figure out what to do (like research swapping to wordpad or type whatsit), so this may be the last for a while. I won't have time for a few days to even think about it all. See ya all some time!