e dropped out of the sky at 9.30 pm one balmy winter’s evening and stepped down from the plane onto tarmac illuminated under African skies. If any of us had thought to look, we’d have found ourselves eyeballing familiar constellations — Cape Town lies on a similar latitude to Sydney — but it was all any of us could do to keep our chins from knocking our chests. We’d boarded that plane 26 hours previously in Wellington, and after a transit stop in Johannesburg, we’d re-embarked for the last drop-dead leg to Cape Town.

Paying little attention to the taxi ride into town, our total focus was twofold –– ensuring we were on the path of least resistance to our hotel and beds, and that we didn’t lose any luggage. Breakwater Lodge is in the heart of Cape Town’s Docklands: it sounded novel although a bit pricey when we booked it over the internet from a range of several thousand kilometres, but we knew we’d be dead beat that night. We knew the Breakwater occupied the premises of an old prison, but we hadn’t quite thought through the implications. You can convert a prison room into a hotel room, but it retains the essential qualities of a prison cell; in this case, bars on the windows and a distinct lack of elbow room. By the time you’ve dumped a double bed where once there was only a stretcher and a slops bucket, there’s little enough floor space to put the bags, let alone squeeze past them. It would do for the night, when all we wanted to do was sleep. But we had four days in Cape Town awaiting the emergence of the bikes from the usual cat’s cradle of customs red tape, and each of us fell asleep firmly resolved to find more commodious digs in the morning.

We woke the next morning, extruded ourselves past our bags to the window and flung the curtains wide to be confronted with a view of … nothing, apart from the wall of the none-too-prepossessing cell block across the way. That just about did it, especially once we got out and about in the Docklands and were treated to the vistas that the Breakwater was uniquely positioned to ignore — the town nestled about Table Bay, presided over by the iconic silhouette of Table Mountain and with a view of Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 18 years.

Paul had arrived a couple of days before the rest of us, and found a place just around the corner from the Breakwater boasting both space and a ravishing panoramic outlook, not to mention secure parking for the bikes once we’d extricated them from bureaucratic limbo. That, we dec