The Marchon Family - '00 South Africa

Day 5

15 Feb 2000: Cape Town - Brackenfell - Muizenberg - Fish Hoek - Kommetjie

We were scheduled to pick up our rental camper that day. The company sent someone to come and get us at our downtown hotel, as we had really no idea where the place was and so we were quite glad that they did ... ;-)

The camper looked really nice. This was my first time in a camper, so I didn't really know what to expect. It was also my first time to drive in a country where they drive on the left side of the road (strange, why would anybody want to do that?). But it was okay. I got used to the drive-on-the-left stuff quite quickly and the camper wasn't too hard to drive, either. It was a little bigger than a regular car (especially wider, which was quite a thing in the narrow streets of the villages on the Cape Peninsula) and was maybe a little on the heavy side for the engine that was in it, but we did not intend to travel over any big mountain passes, just up and down the coast, so it was just fine.

Theoretically, five people could have slept in the camper: 2 in a permanent double bed on top of the "cockpit" (with almost no headroom ...), 2 in a convertible double bed-table-sitting area at the rear of the camper and another person in a similar single bed right behind the front seats. As we were only two people, we could choose. We spent the first night up on top, thinking that it would be neat to have a bed that's always a bed and not to have to build one every evening, but it got quite warm up there and I felt you almost couldn't move without bumping into something. So the next night we tried the table-bed and that was much better.

The camper was quite well equipped. It had a refrigerator, gas stove (which we never used), microwave (which only worked with external electrical power, but that was really no problem in the campgrounds where we stayed and we used that a lot), toaster. It even had a shower and toilet built into it, which we didn't use either, but it was nice to know, that we had these things, should we ever need them.

Distance traveled: ca. 60 km

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