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Published: November 21st 2010
Ever since I read James Michenor's "The Covenant" during pre-apartheid days when I was in high school, I have been fascinated by this country. It has an intriguing history that involves people from around the globe - Africans (both Bantu people and the bushmen), Europeans (the Dutch, English, the French protestants), Indians, Malays, Indonesians, and Chinese. We were looking for the perfect destination to go to during Diwali week. So we settled on South Africa. I say settled because Bindu was hesitant. She would have rather gone somewhere in Asia. I was sure she would enjoy South Africa and she did! We decided to visit Cape Town, the wine lands nearby and Kruger national park.
Cape town is a gem. It has been blessed by nature. It is surrounded by water and Table mountain provides it a majestic backdrop. The spirit of the people there is laid back.
We were picked up at the airport by a guide who was of Indian heritage. His family has long forgotten their people in India but they do their best to maintain the roots. My first impression of Cape Town is that it is smaller than I imagined. The roads are
modern and traffic is light. We pass by a township just near the airport. I can see the ramshackle corrugated tin roofed houses contained within a fenced off area. That part looks entirely third world but surrounded by the first world. That is the enigma of South Africa.
We reach our hotel which is right in the middle of the city. Once we checked in, we showered and decided to head out for dinner. A lot of people had warned us about crime in South Africa. So were wondering whether we should be walking around at night. However, one look at the sad menu of the restaurant at the hotel pushed us to take the risk. We wander around looking around for a place to eat. We see a few drunks here and there but we never felt like we were in any danger (Hey, we are from Portland. We are used to seeing harmless weirdos). People are friendly when we ask for directions. We finally settled on a small restaurant attached to gay and lesbian theater! The food is so so.
The next day we meet Marc H who will be our guide in Cape Town. A
few words here about Marc. We all loved Marc. He is quiet but has a nice sense of humor. He quickly read us and the kind of things we wanted to see. He would take us there but all the while reminding us that we should not complain to our travel agent saying "now why was this place not on the list." I suspect he would get in trouble with his manager for going "off route." Nevertheless we loved him for it.
Our first visit is to the Cape Town castle which is not a castle at all. It was a military outpost and is the oldest building in South Africa. The Dutch built the castle between 1666 and 1679 mainly to defend Cape Town. The castle has five points so Marc calls it "our Pentagon." On the castle grounds we see students getting ready for a parade, practicing their steps. They reflect today's South Africa- multi-colored. There is a nice museum within the castle with some interesting period furniture. One can also get a nice view of Table Mountain and the city from the top of the castle's walls.
Our next stop is the District 6 museum.
District 6 was a mixed neighborhood that attracted both white and non-white immigrants to Cape Town. During the 60's, the apartheid government declared District 6 to be a white only area. Over the next few years the non-white residents were asked to move to townships. They were not compensated for their loss. Instead, they were given 'housing" in the cape flats. This imposed great difficulty on the people. Not only were residents asked to leave their homes and their way of life, they now had to commute longer distances to work in the city. This affected their standard of living because the bus fare would eat up a large portion of their meager wages. In the post apartheid period, the former residents joined together to build a museum in an old church. The sad part of all this is much of the land reclaimed by the whites has not been put to any use at all. In fact, the dispute continues as what should be done with the land. At the museum, we were lucky to meet several former residents including Joe Shaffer. Joe is a musician and an activist. He told us stories of what the old neighborhood was
like and difficulties the residents had to bear. So much of South Africa's history is so young that you can still meet and talk to people who have lived it. It was fascinating.
We quizzed Marc on the racial classifications of apartheid South Africa. The classifications are Whites, Coloreds, Indians and Blacks. The whites are made up of Afrikaaners, British, and French Huguenots. Anyone that is not purely black or purely white are classified as colored. Indians are descended from indentured laborers that were brought by the British to work in the sugar cane fields of Natal. Africans/ Blacks are from the Bantu tribes of Xhsosa, Zulu, Shona etc. Race in apartheid South Africa decided everything. It decided where you lived, where you went to school, where you shopped, where you went to the beach and even which park bench you could sit on. It must have been oppressive to say the least. I am glad this madness is over but I still wonder what caused one man to think he is superior of another based solely on the color of their skin.
Capetownians enjoy being outside. We visited several outdoor markets. We first went to Green Market
Square which is a great place to shop for souvenirs. We shopped there for a bit, and since it was a Saturday, many school children were out performing dances on the street. Later Marc took us to another market that only happens on Saturdays. I forget the name of the place but it was great. The locals were there enjoying the food and wine. There were over a hundred food stalls selling all types of food. Everyone looked relaxed. It reminded me of the Portland farmer's market in the park blocks. We ordered some flam kuchen and Bindu went out to look for a place to sit. Maya and I got the order and started looking for Bindu. We see Bindu talking to this woman. We join them. That is how we meet Regina. She tells us that she moved out here from Germany in the 60's and that she is a writer. She had recently published a book centered around the correspondence her father sent from eastern front when he was fighting for Germany. When we express interest in her books she asks us where we were staying. She promises to drop off her books of poetry and a
novel. We said good bye to her thinking she was just being polite. But the next day, when we came back from our sight seeing trip we were surprised to find a packet waiting for us at the front desk with her books. We were so touched that she would go to all that trouble. Bindu read the novel which was somewhat autobiographical and describes her life growing up in post war Germany as a refugee from the east. Anyway, we later called her from India to thank her. One of the best things about travel is meeting interesting people like this.
The next day was packed with activities. In that one day we saw sea lions, baboons, ostriches and penguins all in the wild. I don't think this combination is possible anywhere else but South Africa. The drive along the Cape coast is gorgeous. It reminded me a lot of the coast along Hwy1 on the California coast. We first go to Cape Point Reserve which is a vast nature reserve by the ocean side. The bushes that the locals call fynbos (fine bush in Afrikaans) were everywhere and blooming. We climbed up to the light house hill
where can supposedly see the point where the Indian ocean meets the Atlantic. But Marc says that such a point is not stationary but moves depending on tide and currents. We also stop by the Cape of Good hope for a Patel snap.
We continued our drive coast and reached Simons Town. There we saw the statue of a dog, a great dane, in a seaman's uniform. Marc tells us to take a picture and tells us the story of this dog. Apparently this dog lived somewhere inland but loved the sea. It would hop on the train and come to Simons Town where the British Navy had a base. It would walk into the train compartment and take up a lot of room by sprawling on the seats. Many of the riders started complaining. Meanwhile the dog had befriended the seamen belonging to the British navy that was stationed there. They decided that they would enroll the dog into the navy so he could get a salary to pay for the train ride. When they were registering the dog no one knew its name. So when asked what the name is, the person doing the registration said "nuisance"
and when asked nuisance what?, the person said "I don't know, just nuisance". That name stuck so the dog became "Just Nuisance" and continued its practice of riding the train to visit the seamen. When the dog died the statue was erected. There is a picture of this in the photo section.
We then went to see the penguins in Simon Town. These are African penguins that are smaller than their Antarctic cousins. Apparently they invaded the beach and the surrounding properties. We found them hiding everywhere, even under bushes. They became such a nuisance that the local government installed little nests for them made from cut plastic barrels. Their own "township"!!!
After seeing the penguins we headed off to see the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. I highly recommend this. It is set in a beautiful setting and very well planned. Marc gave us some time here to wander around which we did. One unique thing about the garden was that they did not have any garbage cans. People were expected to carry any trash they create and dump it in the trash cans at the entrance to the garden. Even with this we did not see any trash
at all dumped inside the garden. We then visited the Cecil Rhodes Memorial.
At the end of this long day, Marc dropped us off at the waterfront for dinner. We found a seafood restaurant that serves sushi (Maya loves sushi) called Willoughby and Co, in the mall! British sushi in South Africa - it was not bad. We hailed a taxi on our own to get back to the hotel. One thing about taxis in South Africa is that there are no meters. In Cape Town the taxi would list the fare as 11 rand per KM but there was no meter to measure how far we had come. We later learned that we should negotiate the fare before we get in the taxi. I did not know this. When the taxi driver demanded 70 rand I naturally assumed that he was trying to pull a fast one on me. With bargaining creds earned in India I paid 50 rand and walked away. Next day Marc tells me the fare was probably more like 70 rand not the 50 I paid so I felt bad for the taxi driver.
The next day we got up early to get
to the top of Table Mountain. Our earlier effort had been thwarted by bad weather. Even though we are early up there we found out that we can't buy tickets to the cable lifts because the internet is down. We wait around and finally get on. The view from the top of the mountain is gorgeous. That day we had very little fog so we got a beautiful view of Cape Town and rest of the cape.
After seeing Table Mountain, Marc dropped us at the waterfront so we can catch the ferry to Robben Island. Robben Island is the place where most of the political prisoners including Nelson Mandela were kept during apartheid. These days it is preserved as a museum. We were given a tour of the prison and it's history by a former inmate. We saw the cell where President Mandela spent a good part of 20 years. During this time, he was secretly working on his memoir which he kept hidden in a garden. This was eventually discovered by the authorities. Later, an Indian inmate smuggled the copy out when he was being released. The inmates were made to work mining the lime quarries on
the island but they were never told what was done with this lime. Sadly, it may be nothing but make work. We left the island with a profound sense of respect for those that were unjustly imprisoned here for saying nothing more their demand to be treated as humans. They were treated as less than that by the apartheid regime. It is great credit to all South Africans that everyone decided to move beyond the past and reconcile.
We came back from Robben Island and stayed around the water front for shopping. We later decided to eat at a African restaurant in the Museum of Gold. It was a fantastic experience. The menu was a set menu with various small dishes that came from all parts of Africa. The dinner was accompanied by performances from dancers, drummers, puppeteers and singers. We really enjoyed it.
The next morning we headed off to wine country. We were delighted to find that Marc would accompany us again. We first stopped to see the monument to Afrikaans language. Afrikaans is mostly spoken by the whites of the Dutch ancestry and the coloreds peoples. It is a living language. With Dutch as the
base it borrows from English, Portuguese, Zulu, Xhsosa, Khoi, and Indonesian languages. In short, it is an amalgam of all the people that have set foot in South Africa.
We spent the rest of the day visiting several wineries. Wine has been made in South Africa for more than 400 years. The wine lands are beautiful. The area is surrounded by the Hottentot mountains which make the weather perfect for growing vines. One of the reasons wine growing took root in this area was because the French Huguenots settled here first. We visited a town called the Franchehoek- French corner. It was a beautiful little town with nice shops and restaurants. We saw the Huguenot museum here and had lunch at one its famous restaurants which we highly recommend called Ruebens. We stayed just one night here but I could have easily spent another day or two sampling the wine and food. The next day we had to get up at 5 in the morning so we could drive back to Cape Town and catch a plane to Joburg.
With this our trip to the Cape ended. It is one of the most beautiful corners of the world.
Capetown town hall
Mandela's first speech after his release was from here. I would move there in a blink if I could find a decent job.
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Kim Gibson
non-member comment
:)
Wow! So cool that you started up this travel blog; great photos! Any chance you'll be making a pit stop into P-town? We miss you guys!