Hello everyone on HIVE and especially the Wednesday Walk Community, my name is Jasper and I’m writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa!
On Sunday morning, my wife decided to have a girl’s date with one of her good friends, leaving me on daddy duty to look after our baby daughter who has recently turned 1 year old. Luckily, my parents have just returned to Cape Town and are very eager to catch up on all the time they’ve been missing with the baby, so we headed over to visit them.
It had rained heavily the afternoon before and was still drizzling in the morning when I arrived. After the baby’s mid-morning bottle, just as it was approaching her nap time, the skies cleared a bit. Now, nothing gets my baby daughter started on her nap quite like a nice walk in the pram, so we decided to take the gap, and all go on a nice walk together through the suburb of Constantia.
My mother is 73 and my father is about to turn 75. However, after a lifetime of hiking (my father was an elite mountaineer and mom often joined him at base camps), they are still as fit as fiddles!
Constantia is one of the more upmarket, wealthy suburbs of Cape Town, but in a more laid-back, almost rural, way. Instead of fancy fashionable big houses, the rich people here tend to favour big gardens, and many have tennis courts, or even a stable for horses. There are many green open areas like this for walking, and even several of Cape Town’s oldest and most famous wine farms like Groot (Large) Constantia and Klein (Small) Constantia are located here which is great if you feel like wine-tasting but don’t have time to drive to the outskirts of town to the larger vineyard areas of Stellenbosch and Durbanville. That’s right, South Africa is a large country with many climates from semi-desert on the North-western side to sub-tropical on the Eastern side – but Cape Town is roughly in the middle, and our climate resembles the Mediterranean. We grow world class wine and olives here!
The tallest mountain is actually the back side of the famous Table Mountain – it’s actually more of a sloping triangle and only really looks like a table from the North. We are in the "Southern Suburbs" now.
We’ve come to the best part of the walk – a “green belt” path running along a small river that is a much beloved walking route for the people in the area.
My baby daughter is definitely sleeping in the pram by now (success!!) and is covered up to protect her from the slight breeze, while my mom (a keen gardener and artist) enjoys checking out a display garden of indigenous plants!
If you look carefully, you can see a dog enjoying the long grass – the green belts are very popular with dog-walkers, and if you love dogs you can have a lot of fun spotting them all playing as you walk past!
You can see that the ground is still wet from the recent rains and everything is looking lush and green. Cape Town has hot dry summers that can turn the path dusty and the vegetation dry and brown… I think I prefer it like this!
So we had a lovely, beautiful walk and the main goal, getting the baby to have her mid-morning nap, was a complete success! We were incredibly lucky as well – shortly after the walk was over and we were safely back indoors, the Heavens opened and it started to rain heavily again!
THE END