An early start
A pre-dawn start to the day allows one to savour the magnificence of the Cape Point Nature Reserve in isolation, before any tourists arrive. It can be imagined that you are an early inhabitant of this windswept finger of land battered by swells relentlessly rolling in from the Southern Ocean. You are sitting on a smooth boulder at the foot of a crumbling cliff, looking at a small colony of seals draped over an outcrop just offshore. A small seal would provide food for many days, but it’s too deep to wade and you haven’t learned to swim yet. It will have to be another day of tugging mussels from the rocks.
Not being an early inhabitant, nor a tourist, the purpose of the dawn patrol was to do some pelagic birdwatching from the empty carpark at the Cape of Good Hope with a group of friends, although my participation was limited to binoculars rather than the more effective scopes of the others. My interest in birds is up there with my interest in everything else natural – clouds, waves, the light on a mountain cliff at sunset, our vast floral kingdom (so much easier to photograph than birds) and possibly top of the list – geology. The mangled, tangled layers of rock that jut out to sea at the Cape of Good Hope provide endless fascination, in form and colour and weathering. And so it was with a spring in my step that I headed up the trail to the headland, something I last did about four years ago. Then, the path had deteriorated and was in fact treacherous for anything less than a klipspringer, but now a small amount of maintenance has been done and the gaping holes between the poles of each step can be avoided. I stopped, as ever, to admire the view from every zigzag. To the left, an endless ocean with nothing in between me and Antarctica. Well, not quite – the always impressive swells crashing over Bellows Rock were evidence of one piece of land that must be avoided at all costs by shipping. To the right, the first sunlight filtered over the plateau to rest on the crests of the waves at Neptune’s Dairy, with Platboom dunes still in deep shade. Again, to be an early inhabitant…
The wind had not yet picked up and I lingered awhile at the summit, alone on the ancient landscape, windswept, majestic. The Cape of Storms. The descent was a little quicker and I soon took my place among the scopes to spy albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels, gannets and hundreds of cormorants dipping in between the swells and diving into tight balls of baitfish. A huge shape surged out of the sea, white below and grey above, its mouth agape, before crashing back into the water – a great white shark hunting seals perhaps. Then a seal thrashes its prey on the surface while gulls hover over scraps – an unfortunate octopus, a favourite of seals. A busy morning off the Point.
The sun reaches us at last, a welcome warmth from the icy air and soon the cars and buses approach, bearing tourists from near and far to have their picture taken at this world famous Cape, before being transported to the parking area below the lighthouse for the obligatory climb to see where two oceans do NOT meet. They don’t know what they have missed, but we certainly know why the early start was worth it.
‘
