Lucky Cape Town

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We thought we were unlucky, having left Sydney an hour late and, after doing the customs queue shuffle for an hour in Johannesburg, we stupidly got ripped off by some guy at the airport “helping” us to catch our onwards flight. We thought we were unlucky, that is, until we found out that Qantas cancelled all flights the following day due to a strike.


Then it rained for a day and a half. Then, when we finally got a clear day to visit Table Mountain the cable car was closed due to high winds. Despite all this though we’ve thoroughly enjoyed our stay in Cape Town, which is a very pretty city brimming with history.


We have stayed in an apartment in a gated community near the V & A Waterfront. The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront is a docks area that combines tourist pap with real ship repairing activities, and which is popular with locals as well. We wandered around on a Sunday afternoon and the place was buzzing with people out for the day. There had been some kind of event on which entailed people dressing up as either accident victims or monsters (it was hard to tell which sometimes) so we had a drink in a beer garden surrounded by young ghoulish-looking people before listening to a few songs from a band playing to a large crowd in an amphitheatre. It was all very friendly and safe, which is to be expected when about every fifth person is a security guard.


There are a couple of museums in the area, one about the quite interesting maritime history and the other devoted to the Robben Island prison experience. There are bars and restaurants aplenty and a shopping mall the size of Miranda Fair. That’s a really big shopping centre, for anyone who doesn’t frequent the dark lands to the south of Sydney.


Maybe best of all at the V & A are the South African fur seals. There are heaps of them, and they climb onto the various jetties around the marina to sunbake just when and where they please. It’s great to see these magnificent animals relaxed and content so close to the city. It’s even better to see some fool tourist scared shitless when they approach too close and get a warning growl and lunge. Despite all this the seals seem quite tolerant of us humans using their waterfront.


And Cape Town is in a magnificent setting, with Table Bay on one side and the incredibly steep trio of Table Mountain, the Lion’s Head and Signal Hill cutting it all off from the hinterland. The clouds roll off the top of Table Mountain like the smoke from dry ice. There are numerous beachside suburbs with spectacular apartment blocks, trendy bars and restaurants and, actually, quite nice beaches as well. The architecture of the city centre seems to be nothing much, though, although we enjoyed a walk through the Company Garden and there are a few nice art deco buildings as well as the occasional reminder of the city’s Dutch heritage.


Table Mountain, just over a thousand metres high and with a summit reached by either cable car or three hours walking – cable car for us! – has terrific views of Cape Town and the better part of the Cape of Good Hope. The cable car has a rotating floor, so that everyone gets a 360 degree view on the trip up and back, although the views from the summit are so spectacular that the cable car ride is really just a formality.


Of course, the history of the city, and indeed of South Africa, isn’t quite so squeaky clean, and the remains of District Six were a poignant reminder of the relatively recent apartheid experience. District Six was an inner city area that was basically razed to the ground under the apartheid laws in order to force the 60,000 fraternizing inhabitants to go their own ways. Such was the outcry about this that to this day just about no new development has taken place on the land, which continues to hold only grass, weeds and the occasional derro. It is a rather moving symbolic tribute to the victims of this misguided policy.


We visited Robben Island, reached by half an hour through the Atlantic swells by ferry, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for all those long years. We did the mandatory walk past his cell but as it’s exactly the same as all the others it was nothing exciting.


What made the trip worthwhile, though, was the commentary from the guide, a former political prisoner himself. His retelling of the process of de-humanisation that the prisoners were put through was very poignant. They were crudely humiliated with nakedness. The authorities falsified letters to or from the prisoner’s wives asking for divorce or informing them of adultery. The prison doctor would give a strong purgative to every prisoner who reported sick. As a result of the latter many prisoners died in their cells because they knew any treatment they received would only make them worse anyway.


The treatment of these people, over a 25 year period, in the face of an increasingly desperate regime, and their ultimate success of their philosophy of forgiveness and peaceful negotiation, is surely one of the most amazing stories of the twentieth century.


We visited the Jewish Museum, and saw a retrospective of the cartoons of Jonathan Shapiro, all featuring Nelson Mandela. Even though we missed the local nuances they were funny and touching all at once, and the message that came across was just how important Mandela is to the new character of South Africa. Note to self – get his book (“The Long Walk”) and read it.


Tomorrow we head north to the Sabi Sands Game Reserve, for a spot of big game hunting before tiffin, while memsahib sees to the servants and starches the pith helmets. Well, actually, we’re hoping to take some photos of the wild animals. Stay tuned.

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Photos

The big 4 Nobel Laureates
Luthuli, Tutu, de Klerke and Mandela