I have always loved aquariums and kept tropical fish as a child and young adult, spending many happy hours observing them. My first recollection of a marine aquarium was in Durban aged 6 or 7 and seeing the sharks, sawfish and other large fish through the small viewing portholes was magical. When we lived in Cape Town there was no Two Oceans Aquarium so we have made a point of visiting when we have come back to the city since and no visit is less exciting than the previous one. It has been great to see Edin share the same excitement and wonder that I felt as a child and equally rewarding to see it not wane as she has grown. See her blog post for her impressions of this visit.

Just before we left New Zealand we were phoned by friends from the UK who were heading to Australia via South Africa on the Queen Mary and were looking for advice on what to see and do. It transpired that they were arriving in Cape Town on exactly the day we were so we planned to meet the next day at the aquarium as it is an easy landmark to find. We spent a couple of hours enjoying the aquarium before all having lunch together and it was great to see the changes since our last visit. These included a display with some penguins and oystercatchers so we got to enjoy birds and fish at one venue.

After a fish lunch at the V&A Waterfront we headed around the Cape Peninsula to the African Penguin colony at Boulders Beach near Simonstown. It was during this drive that it became clear that there was problem with our rental car which would waste part of the following day and force us to change our plans for what we had hoped to do in Cape Town.

All photos taken with my favourite little Fuji X100. I use it to record combined JPG and RAW files and usually find the JPGs so good that I don’t often process the RAWs but in the varied lighting conditions of the aquarium it is useful to control the colour temperature in post. Using Nik Viveza 2 is helpful to fine-tune colour variations in images with different light sources in different parts of the image.

Next week – Penguins!