Signal Hill, Lions Head & Cape Point

When I walk out of the door of my house, I’m seeing all the main mountains of Cape Town. I’m looking at Devils Peak, Table Mountain, Lions Head & Signal Hill.
These mountains provide me with a nice view but climbing them is a different story. When you look at these mountains they don’t seem to be that high, but when you start the journey to take on these mountains, you’ll find out, just like me.
The first mountain we decided to climb was Signal Hill, this idea came very sporadically from my Belgium friend Warre. We were in the city centre and didn’t really have a plan on what to do for the afternoon, then this idea popped up in his head. We had absolutely no idea how to get to this mountain and even if we would find the mountain, we were not sure if there was a specific road that would bring us to the top.
Tourists as we are, the unkown made it all more interesting for us and we decided that we would just keep walking up hill in the city and see if we would end up at Signal Hill. The walk in the city was very steep so we had the idea we were doing something right, but the mountain was still far away. We kept on walking and walking and suddenly we came at a dead-end, with the mountain in our far view but we were not even near to the top. We were thinking, ‘We didn’t walk all this way, to go back down’, So we went a little bit through the bush bush and then we came along a fence. ‘Dammit, another road block’, luckily for us there was a hole in the fence, just big enough for us to squeeze through. After going through the fence we obviously arrived somewhere we shouldn’t be. We saw, old skool canons, old bunkers & old guns, but at the same time we had an amazing view. We arrived at an old navy camp that was put there to protect the city back in the days ‘I guess’. From the navy camp we had a perfect view on the city, right from us we were looking out on the city centre, Cape Town stadium in front of us and Signal Hill left from us. After enjoying the view we still had a mission, we had to get up that Hill! So we were looking for a way guiding us out of the navy camp and towards Signal Hill. Some looking around did the trick and we saw a road that fitted our wishes. We walked over the Navy camp towards the road, so far we didn’t hear or see anybody on the camp, but when we were walking towards the road I almost soaked my pants. Out of the blue a serious sized dog started barking and started running after us. Hero as I am I was the first one to run away as fast as I could, damn, this dog sounded like it was ready to eat us for lunch. Luckily for us there was one random peace of fence on the premises were you can just walk around but this dog had a peanut for a brain and ran straight into the fence ‘idiot’. Which gave us the chance to escape from this creature and continue our journey without missing a peace of our leg, butt or body.
We found another path going uphill that seemed to bring us closer to Signal Hill, this path looked like it would bring us to Signal Hill really fast, It looked like it would go straight up the Hill but our eyes misconceived us, this path was going left right, left right, left right and after walking several circles and one hour later we managed to get at the top of Signal Hill. Something that seemed to be quite an easy journey turned out be a full day trip but we had fun and we reached our goal. The view from Signal Hill is astonishing and the full day trip was worth it but don’t do this trip without someone that knows what he’s doing, this could save you a lot of trouble, with dogs for example.

Lions Head.
Last week we decided to walk up Lions Head, Lions Head is the second highest mountain of Cape Town ‘just saying’. This was planned for a Saturday, it was a good thing that I’ve been drinking the day before so I could slowly die while walking up. Together with Warre and his house mates we started the journey. This time we learned from our mistakes and just took a cab that would bring us to the beginning of the path going up Lions Head. In the beginning this journey is pretty easy, it are sand paths going uphill, at some point the sand paths decide to stop and then there are only rocks that need to be walked/climbed. This makes the journey a bit tricky. The rocky paths have a width of about one meter, next to this one meter there is nothing, literally nothing, just a long way down if you fall. After some walking, climbing, sweating, and detoxing we arrived at the top of Lions Head. Right on time for the sunset . So far Lions Head is the best spot I’ve ever been to see the sunset. I was looking at the beach, the whole city behind me, Table Mountain next to me and a clear blue ocean in front of me with a sun that slowly disappears in the water. I think I had a perfect moment at that spot, where everything was the way it should be.

Cape Point
The good thing about our University is that we have quite some spare time, this gives us the opportunity to basically check everything this city has to offer. My Austrian friend Joe had the idea to check out Cape Point and Cape Of Good Hope during the week, since I was finished with University quite early I could join him. While we were heading over there, we figured we might as well check out the penguins at Simon’s Town. We started our trip around 1PM, the drive would grab about 1,5 hours of our time, on our way towards Cape Point we had a stop at Simon’s Town as mentioned before. Here we stayed a while to take some nice footage of the penguins and of the amazing scenery. We continued our journey and drove into the protected nature reservoir that comes before Cape Point, this nature reservoir is filled with baboons, that just walk over the road and basically do whatever they want. This was something we didn’t know until there suddenly was small traffic jam of about 12 cars on our side of the road with a bus as the first car and a similar traffic jam on the other side of the road, but there was a perfect gap between the traffic jam on our side of the road and the other side of the road where our car fitted through perfectly. Impatient as we are and wondering why everybody stopped in the middle of the road we passed all stopped cars and with quite some speed we squeezed the car through the gap. When we passed through the gap we finally saw what was in front of the first car(the bus). There was a whole baboon family having lunch in front of the bus without even considering moving. I think we got very lucky there because the chances were actually quite high that one of these animals would walk just a little and would end up under one of the wheels of our car or on the front window of the car. This would get us in serious trouble since these baboons are protected species and we really don’t want to kill a baboon ‘sorry baboons, next time we will wait till you finish lunch’. Continuing the journey we arrived at Cape Point, this place is absolutely breath taking. The nature is a mixture, of mountains, sea, beach and a nature that has all the colors of the rainbow. It has purple stones and orange mountains for example. From Cape Point it’s a hike of about 45 minutes towards Cape of Good Hope. At Cape of Good Hope there is actually nothing to see, there is just the sign saying ‘Cape of Good Hope’. The journey from Cape Point towards Cape of Good Hope is what makes this place special to me. But they always say that it’s the journey that counts, that is definitely true in this case.

That’s about it for this blog, talk to everyone soon :-)

Yours Truly,


Robert Peeters