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Published: March 27th 2014
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I haven’t met a person in my life who has experienced Cape Town and hasn’t had good things to say about this city. If the same goes for you, then that trend continues here. We arrived in Cape Town by air from Zambia, rented a car and arrived at a hostel in town shortly thereafter. Awaiting us there were Gustav and Daniel, two of my classmates from Sweden who you may recall from our Okavango adventure. What we had not anticipated upon our arrival to Cape Town was that nearly every hostel in the city was booked through the weekend (we had arrived on a Friday) for St. Patty’s Day weekend, and so we had been forced to only booking our first night of our scheduled week in Cape Town and planned to figure it out once the four of us were together. This is often the case in backpacking… part of the beauty of it truly to not really know which direction the wind might blow you tomorrow, but it often unfolds quite serendipitously, as this week did in this instance.
Throughout my week in Cape Town, different areas we explored reminded me of different places in the states.
For example, the main strip at night (at least on St. Patty’s Day weekend) reminded me of Bourbon Street and driving the coast outside of Cape Town felt like ocean side regions north of San Francisco. Despite these reminders, and the modern development and beautiful real estate around the city center and its nearby suburbs, there is one striking dichotomy to note. Just a 30 minute drive from the city center is South Africa’s second biggest ‘township’, the politically correct word for the slums of tin roof houses. This particular township is home to more than 1 million people, and as it was explained to us, the townships are a consequence of the apartheid history that only ended 20 or so years ago. Its two completely different worlds, side by side.
For our first day in Cape Town, we decided to do a day trip to Cape Point, famous for the rough waters off shore here where warm water currents of the Indian Ocean and cold water currents from Antarctica collide. We came down the west coast of the Cape, a scenic 2 hour drive the whole way with numerous points overlooking white sand beaches and rocky hillsides and
mountains that come right up out of the ocean. The point itself is consistent with this - just a beautiful sun stroked, wind blown landscape of small mountains decorated with rocks, small shrubs and expansive ocean views and looking out you know it’s just open water between you and Antarctica. On the return from the cape, we hugged the eastern shore overlooking False Bay, home to Seal Island with its highest concentration of Great Whites in the world and where you’ve perhaps seen footage on Nat Geo of the Great Whites jumping out of the ocean to catch seals.
Since we hadn’t been able to find accommodation in the center of town, we booked the next several nights in a coast side beach town called Muizenberg a 30 minutes drive from the city center at a hostel called Stoked, which proved to be an incredibly great place to stay with a surf-beach vibe and clean, comfortable setting. Typically, Muizenberg is an ideal beach for beginner surfers to play around on surfboards in small, wind blown surf, but on our second day in Muizenberg the wind backed off and the biggest swell in 10 months started to come in. This
was one of my personal highlights of the week. It’s not like it compared to Kauai surf, but when you haven’t caught a wave since summer its incredible. I rented a wetsuit and a longboard for a sunset session as the swell started to show and super fun chest to head high waves consistently rolled through. By the following morning the surf was double overhead and the whole bay was frothy white water.
The rest of our Cape Town days were spent with a mix of wine tasting in the Stellenbosch country side east of the city, another road trip hugging the coast east of Muizenberg, hiking around Table Mountain which rises from the relatively flat surroundings to plateau high in the sky giving it its iconic look and suitable name, and a day festival called Holi One which is traditionally an Indian celebration of color but which has been commercialized in the western world (and apparently Cape Town) into themed concerts where everybody where’s white clothes and throws colored rice powder at one another.
From Cape Town we flew back to Joburg, rented a car, made a pit stop at the Apartheid Museum (which is so heavy
particularly because of how recent such history is), and then drove ourselves four hours to Nelpsruit, our launching point for a 3 day Kruger National Park Safari and what will be the next installment of “How To Procrastinate Writing Your Masters Thesis” brought to you by Eric Bronstein and Phil Woods.
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Ann Luckett
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Keep 'em coming - you have no idea how much I am enjoying sharing this adventure with you.