I Discovered Why the Tip of South Africa Was Called the Cape of Storms
Monday May 18, 2009
The wind, swirling around my face and forcing me to hide behind a stone wall, didn't like my umbrella. The wind whipped it inside out and bent the wires holding the cloth so askew that everyone who walked by started laughing. (I was too, while letting the wind push rain pellets into my hair and soak my clothes. We were hiking up to the lighthouse atop Cape Hope, once used as a beacon to warn ships heading around the southern tip of Africa that the shoals were dangerous. (The region was rightly called the Cape of Storms during earlier centuries, in part because fog and rain often kept mariners from seeing the light and their ships wrecked on the rocks. Finally, someone decided "Good Hope" was more encouraging.)
The lighthouse is inside the Table Mountain National Park, which sprawls from the landmark mountain framing Cape Town to the tip of the continent. Inside the park, people follow hiking trails, surf in the waves that roar onto sandy beaches and climb mountains. Within the next few weeks, I'll put more info online about this park that local adventurers enjoy.
The Cape of Good Hope isn’t at the southern tip of Africa. That’s Agulhas. And Table Mountain doesn’t stretch that far.
It’s called Cape Point and it’s at the tip of the Cape Peninsula. The Southern tip of Africa is at Cape Aghulas, further South. It is in the Cape Point National Park, not the Table Mountain National Park, but they are close together on the Peninsula. You obviously had an ill-informed amateur guide and didn’t use your map.