4 - The Blue Train and Cape Town

On Wednesday morning, September 30th, our pre-arranged transportation from the hotel to the Blue Train Terminal did not show up.  The wonderful staff at the hotel, 131 on Herbert Baker, who was not responsible for getting us to the train terminal, took ownership of the problem.  They had their chef drive us in his personal car, accompanied by the night manager because he knew the way to the train station.  They told us not to worry, they would make sure that they were adequately compensated by the transportation company.  They just wanted to make sure that we were on time and arrived safely.  We arrived with only 5 minutes to spare and boarded the train.

The Blue Train is an all-inclusive, luxury train that runs between Pretoria and Cape Town. (However, internet service is lacking.  We were able to keep up with emails but posting items to our blog took too much bandwidth and was not successful.)   It holds 80 guests and was scheduled to include an off-train excursion to the diamond town of Kimberly where we were to be able to explore the “Big Hole” and the Diamond Museum.  The “Big Hole”, which was created to mine diamonds is the largest, man-made hole in the world.  Unfortunately, trains will be trains and they are always late and this caused the excursion to be cancelled.

On-board, we were treated to wonderful scenery, great food and drink, and top notch service.  We also had a wonderful nights sleep on the rocking train.  Our private compartment with en-suite bathroom was beautiful!  While at dinner, our seats were converted to really comfortable beds.

The trip from Pretoria to Cape Town is supposed to take 27 hours – ours was more like 31. 

The scenery from the train, including some shanty towns, continued to change.  It started off with brown fields and scrub plants and as we got closer to Cape Town the land became greener with beautiful mountains in the background.  What was amazing, except for the very few small towns and outposts along the tracks, was that you can see for miles and see nothing but nature.  We would see people walking and could not see where they came from or where they were going to - just land as far as you could see.  We did have a zebra citing.  We will have to wait until we get to Kruger National Park to see lions, tigers, elephants, etc.

 

We arrived in Cape Town around 2:30 and checked in to the Cape Grace, a wonderful hotel on the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront.  After checking out the area and the wonderful shops and restaurants, we met David and Deborah for dinner at The Test Kitchen where we had the most amazing wine/food paring meal, that lasted 4 hours.