May 8 -10, 2018
I left Benicia on Tuesday afternoon, just under a week after
arriving from Mexico. I wasn’t really
ready to go, but the trip was planned and there was no backing out. Sandra, one of my lovely innkeepers, drove me to BART
and then I took a train for an hour and fifteen minutes to the San Francisco
airport, arriving in plenty of time to check in and relax.
The first leg of my journey was an overnight flight from San
Francisco to London, Heathrow. I flew on
British Airways. I had always enjoyed
flying on British Airways but, although the food and drink remained superior,
the Airbus 380 was the most uncomfortable plane I had ever been forced to
endure. I was in the very last row,
making it nearly impossible to recline.
While there were two empty seats next to me, the armrests did not fold
out of the way, so I was unable to stretch out.
There was so little leg room that I couldn’t even lean forward and rest
on the tray table, despite having brought a pillow for that purpose. When the person in front of me reclined, I
had to move over to an unoccupied seat just to be able to use the tray table.
I slept for maybe two hours of the journey, finally giving
up and watching a number of Oscar nominated films that I had missed while
living in Mexico. The curry I had for
dinner gave me indigestion, so I skipped breakfast.
We arrived at Heathrow Termimal 5. My layover was so long that my connecting
flight was not listed. I sat in the
seats in the airport train station until they finally indicated which terminal
I would need to find. Then I took the
train from the C gates to the A gates before boarding a bus to ride twelve
minutes to Terminal 3. Heathrow had
grown substantially in the seventeen years since I was there last. Having arrived at Terminal 3, I had to go
through security again before finding my way to the immense departure
lounge. It was about 2:30 pm when I
arrived and my flight to Cape Town was not due to leave until 9:40 pm. The gates were not announced until an hour
before flight time, so everyone was forced to wait amidst a giant shopping
mall. There was no peaceful gate in
which to relax. Fortunately, there were
plenty of power outlets, so I was able to charge my phone.
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| London, Heathrow |
I got a latte and bought some antacid, glad that credit
cards were accepted everywhere, since I had no pounds with me. I didn’t feel well enough to eat, which would
have relieved the boredom to some extent.
In a way, it was good that I couldn’t sleep because I wanted to sleep on
the plane and arrive acclimated to the new time zone.
By the time our gate was announced and I made my way to the
far end of the terminal, it was already time to board. I had tried to exchange my seat for a window
so that I could sleep, but the flight was full and I had no success. I had a middle seat for the second,
eleven-and-a-half hour leg from London to Cape Town. Despite being trapped in the middle, it was
more comfortable than the previous night because I had enough space to lean
forward and rest upon the tray table. I
refrained from eating dinner, so didn’t feel ill all night. I had a gin and tonic, watched a movie, and
tried to sleep.
I can’t say that I slept well. My neck kept getting stiff. I did manage to get enough rest to keep me
functional. Africa is a huge
continent. We flew across it for nine
hours. I abandoned trying to sleep by
6:00 AM, ate a cookie, and watched another movie. When breakfast came around, I managed to eat
some of it. We finally arrived in Cape
Town at 10:40 in the morning.
Evidence of the water shortage in Cape Town was everywhere. There was water conservation propaganda even on the jetway. The message was repeated as we walked through the airport to international arrivals. Passport control and customs went smoothly and I found my
driver straight away. We had to wait
quite a while for the other three people from the tour, however. I had time to use the ATM to get some
rand before they arrived. Once we were
all accounted for, we drove twenty minutes in a nice Mercedes minivan to the
Radisson Blu Hotel in the Central Business District of Cape Town.
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| Our Room at the Radisson Blu in Cape Town |
Our room was small, but comfortable. While we did have separate beds, they were shoved together, which seemed a bit odd but worked okay in the end. I didn’t want to waste my whole day sleeping, but I did need a nap. I slept until just before 3:00
and just managed to catch the 3:00 shuttle from the hotel to the Victoria and
Alfred Waterfront shopping area.
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| The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront Mall |
The V&A
Waterfront shopping mall is quite extensive and very modern. The shopping mall is enclosed and then there
is a large outdoor area featuring many restaurants, street performers, and a
huge ferris wheel.
I snacked on a baguette with chicken liver pate and had a
lovely latte in an outdoor restaurant.
The quality of the food was excellent and the prices lower than in the
United States. After lunch, I went up in
the ferris wheel to get the lay of the land and take photographs. The topography around Cape Town is quite
stunning. Table Mountain, a huge flat
mesa, dominates the skyline, towering over all the manmade features of the town. The Central Business District clusters around
the harbor and it was only a short drive from the hotel to the harbor.
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| The Ferris Wheel in Cape Town |
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| Cape Town Business District from Above |
After my ride, I walked around the perimeter of the shopping
mall, past all the tour boats, and then cut through a fancy hotel to continue
my walk along the breakwater back to where the shuttle discharged and collected
passengers. It was nearly 5:30 by the
time I finished my walk and I was ready to return to the hotel for the second
installment of my nap.
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| Cape Town Harbor |
Jan, Ramona, and their daughter, Electra, arrived about
11:00. I had been sleeping but was glad
to see them. Ramona’s luggage had
accidentally been taken by another passenger.
She introduced me to her daughter who would be my roommate and then left
us since we were all tired. I sat up
until Electra got herself settled and then returned to bed to sleep off the
last of my jet lag.
May 11, 2018
We were awakened by a wake-up call at 6:30. Since there was
no water for showers, it didn’t take us long to complete our morning
ablutions. We were down at the restaurant
for breakfast by 7:00 and I met the rest of Ramona’s family: her sister, Lucy,
and Lucy's husband Ciro, her niece, Monica, and Monica's husband, Meo. There were lots of breakfast choices, but I stuck
to dried fruit and a little granola with yogurt. They had an amazing coffee machine that
produced perfect espresso drinks. We had
plenty of time to eat before reporting for our tour orientation at 7:50.
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| Ramona & Jan Posing in Front of Chapman's Peak |
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| South African Coast |
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| Long Beach Near Simon's Town |
We met our tour guide, Dale Wesson, and the rest of our tour
group at the orientation. There were only 24 of us including Dale, so it was a nice, manageable group. After
reviewing the program for our coming tour and going over some basic rules, we
boarded the bus and set off on a tour of the Cape Peninsula. We drove south along the coast through Camps
Bay, Llandudno, and Hout Bay. The coast was spectacular and reminded us of Big Sur. Pricey
homes lined the hillsides overlooking the water. Three point four million people live in the
greater Cape Town area. While most of
the communities looked prosperous, we did see some makeshift settlements where
illegal immigrants from other parts of Africa were living in shipping
containers and tar paper shacks. Many towns had baboon monitors whose job it was to chase the troupes of baboons out of town so that they didn't break into houses and raid people's refrigerators.
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| Ostrich at Cape Point Ostrich Farm |
The southern portion of the Cape of Good Hope forms the Cape
of Good Hope Reserve. We entered the
park and were told to keep an eye out for baboons and eland along the way. The only exotic animals we actually saw were
ostrich at an ostrich farm by the side of the road.
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| The Cape of Good Hope |
We drove to the parking lot below the Cape
Point Lighthouse and then hiked up the hill to the lighthouse itself. The coast was quite scenic and it was
impressive to visit such a major milestone for sailors. From the lighthouse, we could see water on
both sides of the cape. Despite it’s
storied reputation, the Cape of Good Hope is neither the southernmost tip of
Africa nor the point at which the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic. Instead, it divides Table Bay, with the Cape
Town harbor, from the more sheltered False Bay where the South African navy is
based.
There was one baboon mingling
with the tourists in the parking lot when we returned, his behavior little
different from that of the vendors hoping to liberate a few rand from the
visitors.
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| Baboon Begging in the Parking Lot |
After spending an hour at the Cape of Good Hope, we got back on the bus and drove north to Simon’s Town where we stopped for lunch. We ate at the Seaforth Restaurant at Boulder Beach. We had lovely sea bass for lunch with rice, salad, and crusty fresh bread. After lunch, we walked down the beach to a boardwalk where we were able to observe African penguins nesting. Most of the chicks had grown quite large, but still sported downy grey feathers. They lounged about in the sun and on the rocks. When annoyed, the birds made a sound like a donkey braying.
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| Mother and Large Chick |
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| Boardwalk at Boulders Beach |
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| African Penguin |
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| Penguins at Boulders Beach |
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| False Bay from Boulders Beach |
Fortunately, the boardwalk kept the people separated from the birds. Some well-meaning organization had built
fiberglass shelters for the penguins, but they were too hot to be used except
during the winter cold. We got our fill
of gawking at penguins and then strolled back along the roadway, checking out
the shops and roadside vendors and stopping for ice cream in a charming garden
setting.
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| Ice Cream Stand in Simon's Town |
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| Kirstenbosch Gardens |
From Simon’s Town, we continued up the east side of the cape
through Fish Hoek to Muizenberg where we turned inland and drove to
Kirstenbosch to visit the botanical garden originally planted by Cecil Rhodes
when he was the richest man in all Africa.
The gardens were truly lovely and filled with interesting plants found
only in that part of South Africa. The Cape Region is the smallest of the six floral kingdoms in the world. In contrast, the Boreal Region encompasses all of North America, Europe, North and Central Asia and North Africa. In the garden, there
were flowers and lily ponds. We climbed
up the hill to walk along a wooden walkway through the forest canopy. The walkway swayed in the breeze and it began
to rain. The garden was beautiful and it
would
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| Canopy Walkway at Kirstenbosch Gardens |
have been nice to linger, but the rain grew heavier and heavier, so we
picked up the pace and returned to the visitor center where we had time to
visit the much drier conservatory full of succulents and cactus.
It got darker and gloomier as we returned to Cape Town from
Kirstenbosch. We had an hour and a half
to relax (or write) before meeting the group for cocktails and a welcome dinner
together. Ramona and I chatted in
Spanish with a family from Colombia.
Dinner was tasty but unremarkable.
Still, after traveling alone so much in Mexico, it was nice to be
surrounded by friends and I had really enjoyed the day.
It was after 9:00 by the time we got back to our room and I
could barely stay awake long enough to finish writing about the day before
falling asleep.
May 12, 2018
The 6:30 AM wake-up call came very early after having been
up half the night with the worst indigestion I had ever experienced. It seemed that my system hadn’t been quite
right since whatever it was I ate in La Cruz.
With no water for showering, it didn’t take long to get ready. I didn’t dare eat much, but munched a few
crackers with cheese.
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| Colorful Houses in Bo Kaap |
By 8:00 we were on the bus and headed for the Table Mountain
cable car. Unfortunately, the top of
Table Mountain was covered by clouds, so there was no point in going up there
to see the view. We rescheduled and did
our city tour first. Our first stop was
Bo-Kaap, the Malay district of Cape Town where the houses are painted in
brilliant colors like Easter eggs. We
stopped to take photographs and walked a short distance past a lovely,
mint-green mosque.
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| Dutch East India Company Vegetable Garden |
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| Statue of Cecil John Rhodes |
Cape Town is not a particularly old or historic city, so
there wasn’t really much to see on the city tour. We spent an hour or so walking through the
former Dutch East India Company
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| Guest House |
vegetable garden (now a lovely park) and past
the guest house where dignitaries were housed which is now the office of the
president when he is in town (he wasn’t.)
We walked past Parliament. South
Africa has different capitals for the legislative, executive, and judicial
branches of government. Cape Town is the
legislative capital.
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| Parliament |
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| Former Slave Lodge |
We stopped for half an hour at Green Market Square where
vendors were setting up a market. Some
of our tour members shopped, others drank coffee, but I merely sat on the steps
of the old city hall and watched the people, trying to avoid the large flock of
pigeons that a group of Asians were encouraging.
From the square, we walked past the former slave lodge where slaves brought from other parts of Africa were sold. The Bushmen, who were the original people of the Cape area were never enslaved. Unfortunately, they mostly died out, anyway.
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| St. George Cathedral |
Our next stop was the St. George Cathedral
where Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu had been headquartered. There was a lovely wooden archway erected in
his honor (an arch for an Arch.) There
was also an elaborate Methodist church prominently advertising that gay people
were welcome. Cape Town is the gay
capital of South Africa (and maybe Africa, as well) and the society is very
accepting, allowing same-sex marriage and adoption of children. In South Africa, almost anyone can adopt a
child, since they feel that children are always better off with some kind of a
home than in an orphanage. South Africa
is also very tolerant of different religions, since no one religion comprises
more than 20% of the population.
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| Methodist Church |
Back on the bus after our walk, we headed once more for
Table Mountain, but found it still socked in.
We drove, instead, to the top of Signal Hill where we could just barely
make out the Sea Point district and the waterfront through the low clouds. They fire a cannon from Signal Hill every day
at noon. When we were there, paragliders
were jumping off the cliff, eventually landing on the beach below.
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| No View from Signal Hill That Day |
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| Maiden's Cove - Table Mountain Still Socked In |
From Signal Hill, we drove down and along the coast through
Sea Point, stopping for a bit to watch the surfers at Maiden’s Cove. It was a spectacular spot with striking
granite boulders forming tide pools and large surf crashing onto a white sand beach. After our visit, we continued south along the
coast to the waterfront, where they let us off near the Robben Island Ferry
landing where we had a hour-and-a-half of free time to shop and eat before our
ferry left at 1:00.
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| Surfers at Maiden's Cove |
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| Cape Town Waterfront |
I needed to buy a warm jacket and a luggage lock, so I left
the others to eat lunch and dashed across the swing bridge over the harbor to
the far side where the shopping mall was located. Having been there a couple of days prior, I
knew exactly where I was going and descended to the Pick and Pay on the lower
level. Pick and Pay had a lovely
selection of food items, but I zoomed through that section straight to the
hardware section where I found the padlocks.
They only had one combination option, so I grabbed a couple of those and
continued on to the clothing section. I
was hoping to get a sweatshirt saying “South Africa” or something but had to
settle for a down vest by a maker that I could have purchased at Target. It wasn’t very African, but it was warm and
comfortable with pockets to keep my hands warm and a nice hood. At 399 rand (about $32), the price was right. Having accomplished my shopping, I was free
to find Electra, Jan, and Ramona and drink a beer while they ate their lunches.
The Robben (“seal” in Dutch) Island ferry terminal did
double duty as a museum about the struggle to end apartheid. We read the historical placards on the walls
as we waited in the long line to go through security before boarding the boat. The ferry ride to the island took about half
an hour. We sat outside on the upper
deck. It was a little chilly, but not
bad enough to make me break out my new vest.
A group of young soccer fans in town for a game sang an African chant on
the way across and the other passengers applauded them.
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| Robben Island, Cape Town, and Table Mountain with Its "Tablecloth" of Clouds |
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| Electra at Robben Island |
Upon our arrival at the island, we were loaded onto a bus
with a local guide and spent an hour touring the island. Robben island was originally a leper
colony. Once a cure was developed for leprosy,
the island was converted to a prison in 1960.
The first prisoners were criminals and they were forced to work in the lime and stone quarries. Beginning in 1962,
political prisoners were housed on the island.
Originally, the political prisoners were housed with the convicts, but
the authorities became concerned that the political prisoners were influencing
the criminals, so they were separated once they had quarried enough stone to
build a new prison for the convicts. We
stopped on the far side of the island to look at the view of Cape Town and see
the few penguins that were nesting there.
Then we headed back to the prison.
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| Robben Island Prison |
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| Our Guide, a Former Prisoner |
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| A Cell for Sixty Prisoners |
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| Nelson Mandela's Cell at Robben Island |
The second part of our tour was conducted by a gentleman who
had been a political prisoner at Robben Island for seven years. He showed us the large, common cell where he
and 59 other prisoners had been forced to sleep on mats on the floor with no
sheets or pillows and no glass in the windows to keep out the wind and the
rain. The more dangerous prisoners, such
as Nelson Mandela, were housed in small individual cells with blacked out
windows so they couldn’t see each other and only buckets for toilet
facilities. They were not allowed to
speak to each other.
The group was
herded slowly down the cell block past Nelson Mandela’s cell where everyone stopped to take a picture. We exited
into the exercise yard and I would have liked to explore and photograph the
prison, but we suddenly realized that we only had five minutes to walk a rather
long way back to the ferry boat, so we detached ourselves from the group and
scurried back to catch the 4:00 ferry.
We were all tired and napped indoors on the ferry ride back to Cape
Town.
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| The Day Mandela Was Freed |
Table Mountain had never shed its mantle of clouds, so we
did not attempt to fit in a trip to the top before our dinner. We actually had an hour to relax and/or write
before it was time to catch the taxi that would take us to eat dinner in the
home of a South African family.
We ate
dinner at the home of Shane and Barbara Brookes and their children Abby and
Jamie. They cooked us a fabulous
traditional meal of butternut squash soup with fresh bread, vegetables, salad,
chicken, and bobotie, a sort of pie made from curried ground beef with raisins
topped with an egg and cream mixture. It
was all scrumptious, but we all favored the bobotie. As sick as I had been, I was skeptical about
eating curry but I couldn’t help myself.
Dessert was malva pudding, a rich, moist, apricot cake topped with
creamy custard.
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| Our Home-Cooked Meal |
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| Our Hosts, the Brookes Family |
Monica and Meo had bailed at the last minute, so it was just
four of us and four of them. It was a
very intimate dinner. We shared a bottle
of wine and the men drank beer. We
talked about many things, especially about the need for educational systems to
provide different kinds of learning experiences for different types of
learners, rather than just medicating the children who struggle with
traditional academic settings. The
family was very hard working. Besides
having regular jobs and hosting dinners for tourists, the family also made
custom candles and baked cupcakes and muffins.
The home was the South African version of a suburban ranch style. It was bright and comfortable, with a large
converted garage area that they used for entertaining. We spent a couple of hours with them before
our taxi returned to shuttle us back to the hotel. It had been a long day and we were asleep by
9:30.
May 13, 2018
We had another early start on Sunday because our tour of the
winelands left at 8:00. I awoke early,
so got up and was down at breakfast by 6:45.
I ordered pancakes and was disappointed to receive crepes that were cold
before I could get any butter onto them.
I ate some fruit and had a latte before returning to the room to write
for half an hour. Our schedule was so
packed that I was having a hard time keeping up with my blog and there was a
lot to remember.
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| "Informal Settlement" Outside Cape Town |
There were only eleven of us on the Winelands tour, but poor
Dale had a hard time keeping us corralled.
We drove for an hour or so past “informal settlements” (formally called
townships) in the Cape Flats area.
Many
of these dwellings were tin or tar paper shacks.
“Townships” were so called because, under
apartheid, groups of black and colored (Indian and Malay) people were often
shipped to outlying areas when the white people decided that they wanted their
land.
Whole communities were forcibly
relocated to less desirable areas.
Today,
the government is attempting to replace these settlements with less fire-prone
housing projects but there are a million illegal immigrants in the Cape Town
area and these people do not want to move because they are not eligible for the
government housing.
Having to rely on
public transit, they also resist having to move further from the city center. Public transit in South Africa is dominated by minivan collective taxis.
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| Church in Stellenbosch |
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| Our First Glimpse of the Winelands |
Our first stop of the morning was the town of Stellenbosch,
a quaint village of Cape Dutch architecture.
The original 17
th century town burned to the ground when the
thatched roofs caught fire.
After that,
they built a system of canals to bring water into the town to fight fires.
These channels exist to this day and we were
warned not to fall into them as we wandered about the town.
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| Water Channel in Downtown Stellenbosch |
We arrived at Stellenbosch just as the shops were opening at
9:00.
There were many lovely, high end
shops and galleries.
I was attracted to
the ostrich leather handbags but put off by the Beverly Hills prices.
I mostly settled for taking photographs but
did buy a colorful papier mache hippopotamus that would go well with my small
collection of carved wooden animals from Mexico.
I wandered and then sat with Jan, Ramona, and
Electra outside a bakery while they drank coffee.
When it was time to leave, Ramona’s sister, Lucy, was
nowhere to be found. We had to send out
a search party to locate her.
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| The Scenery Near Stellenbosch Was Stunning |
In the Stellenbosch region, we visited the Vrede
en Lust (Peace and Passion) wine estate for a tasting. We sat around a long table in a spacious hall overlooking the vineyards
and the mountains beyond.
We were served
a lovely board of meats, cheeses, and chutneys and tasted five different
wines.
My favorite wine was the
pinotage, a cross between the pinot noir and hermitage grapes that is a
specialty of South Africa.
It was a
fruity, full bodied wine and far superior, in my opinion, to the pinot noir
which I often find thin and unsatisfying.
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| Meat and Cheese Board at Vrede en Lust |
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| Terrace Overlooking the Vineyards at Vrede en Lust |
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| Boschendal Winery |
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| Tasting Under the Oak at Boschendal |
After Vrede en Lust, we drove to Boschendal in the
Franschhoek region.
The original Dutch
settlers failed at wine making, so the Dutch East India Company imported French
Hugenots to make wine.
They were settled
at Franschhoek (or French Corner in Dutch.)
At Boschendal, we sat outside under a spreading oak tree and tasted
another five wines plus a brandy.
The
Dutch also brought oak trees to make wine barrels.
The trees grew well, but the lack of cold
winter resulted in wood that was too porous to use for wine barrels.
Even today, the wine barrels used to make
wine in South Africa are imported from France and North America.
Once again, the pinotage was my favorite of
the wines we tasted, although I did like the brandy.
After Boschendal, we had a free hour-and-a-half in the
village of Franschhoek.
We peeked into
the Calvinist church, which had beautiful eucalyptus beams and a pine ceiling
beneath what was originally a thatched roof, although it had been replaced with
metal.
Franschhoek had only one main
road and we browsed through the shops and I bought a couple of brightly colored
ostrich feather dusters.
We weren’t
really hungry but wanted to sit, so we bought some frozen yogurt and sat
outside in a big sort of food court under the oak trees.
It was Mothers’ Day and lots of families were
out enjoying the beautiful weather.
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| Calvinist Church in Franschhoek |
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| Mother's Day in Franschhoek |
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| Wine and Cheese Tasting at Fairview |
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| Fairview Winery |
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| The Vineyard at Fairview |
At 2:30, we left Franschhoek and drove to the Paarl region
where we visited the Fairview Winery.
There, each wine that we tasted was paired with a cheese from their
cheese factory.
There was also a lovely
chardonnay reduction in which to dip the cheeses.
I liked their chardonnay, but still preferred
the pinotage.
The woman conducting our
tasting was also managing another group and we barely had time to finish before
it was time to leave at 4:00.
A few
members of our group wanted to buy wine and theservice was very slow.
As a result, we were quite late leaving. By
the time we had driven back to Cape Town, it was too late to visit Table
Mountain and the clouds had started rolling back in, anyway.
We were disappointed, but it was nice to have
an hour to write before it was time to go to dinner.
Jan, Ramona, and I went with another three people from the
wine tour to a famous restaurant called
Gold. The restaurant puts on a show of African
singing and dancing and serves a set menu of various African foods.
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| Gold Restaurant |
The food in South Africa was heavily
influenced by Malay and Indian cuisines and much of it was very spicy.
There were fish cakes, beans, corn bread,
tomato soup, sweet potato fritters with sesame seeds, venison stew, spinach in
peanut sauce, chicken, lamb filled phyllo cigars and many other dishes.
It was all I could do to take one bite of
each thing.
Dessert was sugar cookies in
the shape of African animals and I snuck mine into my purse for later. I
couldn’t eat another bite.
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| Our Waitress at Gold |
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| The Dancers Visiting Our Table |
The dance troupe was entertaining and, after all the food
was cooked and served, the kitchen staff joined in the singing and
dancing. They were athletic and
enthusiastic. Towards the end, the queen
of the show dusted the patrons with gold powder. They were quite theatrical. It took quite a while to pay the check and
call a taxi and the staff kept us entertained until we left.
