Day 1 & 2

It seems to be getting harder each year to leave for vacation, but after spending some final weekend hours to finish the most essential things at work, it was finally time for my break. After a short hop to London, we took off on a night flight to Cape Town.
The travel agency had booked our tickets without providing an option to check-in online or change our seats. As a result, we were all seated together and many group members took the opportunity to start getting to know each other on the plane already, but that is just not how things work for me. The little autist in me wants to focus on the flights first and start dealing with 18 new people only upon arrival at the final destination. For an unknown reason, people that had booked together did not end up sitting together, which caused moderate levels of distress amongst a few of them. I offered to change my seat with one of them, so that he could sit next to his wife, with the added advantage of removing myself from an area of intense interactions.
Our flight arrived on time, which was apparently not what our guide expected, but once he arrived, we were taken to our hotel in Cape Town. From the hotel Willem and I walked to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront for lunch, after which we took a hop-on-hop-off bus through the city, hopping off at the cable carts to the Table Mountain. During the short walk on the Table we encountered our first fauna, the dassies. On the bus back to town, both Willem and I had severe difficulties to stay awake while watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean. After wandering a huge mall without any maps or direction signs, looking for the supermarket that we knew had to be there based on the people with grocery bags coming from various directions, we had a quick dinner in a pub with live music that prevented any form of conversation and then went back to catch up on some sleep, happy to have one night in a bed after the night flight.
With some degree of guilt I did take a quick shower that evening, taking advantage of the relative luxury of the hotel, while deciding to skip the next few showers at the campsites in the vicinity. The guilt was brought about by consistent advertisement of the severe period of drought that the area was suffering from. It started with signs at the airport and at the tabs in every toilet guests were request to use water very sparsely. Those that decided to still wash their hands despite these pleads, would find out that most tabs were not running anymore anyway. You would think that in a situation like that, they would at least make sure that the provided toilet paper would be of sufficient thickness to possess decent absorption capacity, but paradoxically throughout this trip it seemed that there was an inverse relationship between the urgency of the pleads to limit the use of water and the thickness of the toilet paper. This was an exponential rather than a linear relationship, asymptoting at a thickness that was suboptimal both for the purpose of wiping your muff or catching your boogers, the latter of which were constantly produced at great quantities, induced by the exposure to endless amounts of dust.