We have continued our sightseeing in Cape Town – on weekends and whenever we have a chance.
Table Mountain is such a landmark in this city. It rises 1000 feet to a large plateau (table) and sits right in the middle of Cape Town. It seems to have its own climate. Some mornings it is topped with clouds, other days quite clear. It also has a big influence on the winds coming off of it. In the evening those of us to the east of Table Mountain have a much earlier sunset. The mountain is the beginning of a range that runs down the Atlantic coast to Cape of Good Hope. Table Mountain is a national park and hence, no development has occurred on it except for a cable car to take you to the top where the vistas are incredible. There is also a restaurant on the top. Many people walk up the mountain on trails, which include ladders in some spots. Most ride up the cable car, as we did for the sunset viewing. We waited in a line for about an hour and then had dinner on top as we watched the sun set into the Atlantic Ocean.
Another day we took a ferry to Robben Island, a former penal colony where political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were held during apartheid. The boat ride takes about 40 minutes and the views looking back toward the city are beautiful. On the island, we were taken around on a bus with a tour guide who liked to quiz us about how well we remembered what she had said. It is a bleak landscape. In the middle is a limestone quarry where the prisoners chopped limestone during the day. The quarters were probably built in the 1950s. Most were large dorm rooms, but Block B had individual cells about 6 x 9 for the high profile political prisoners such as Mandela, who spent 18 years there. There was a courtyard adjacent to the cell block where the prisoners used hammers to break limestone into small pieces. The non-political prisoners did have a football (soccer) league, but the fields were built so that the political prisoners couldn't see them. There is a small community on the island that was built for the guards and their families, but only a few homes are now occupied by the staff of the Robben Island memorial. The sense of being in the cell block where Mandela and other honored leaders of the new South Africa were imprisoned was a moving experience. It felt similar to the Derg Museum, which we visited in Addis Ababa.
Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. On the eastern slopes of Table Mountain is a large park and garden, considered by some to be the best botanical garden in the world, or at least in Africa. As the gardens climb the beginning slopes of the range, they have brought in and planted examples of Western Cape flora. It is extremely lush, maybe because this is summer, but the mild weather here allows for a huge variety of tropical plants. In addition to the natural beauty of the park, it also has a massive amphitheater setting that can hold up to 6000 people on the grass to listen to the 90 minute concert performances that occur each Sunday in the summer. The concert ends just as the sun passes out of view over Table Mountain. Everyone brings blankets and picnic food and wine. So far, we have been to two of these concerts. The first one was a blues festival with a history of the blues presented through song. The featured performer was from the U.S. and he was excited to be making his first trip to South Africa. During this performance, many people in the audience got up and danced, which just adds immensely to the whole experience. At our second Kirstenbosch concert, we saw and heard the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra playing light opera, with three wonderful opera singers. In that setting, with mountains surrounding the exquisite sound and even a view of the ocean in one direction, it is an experience that defies description. It was an incredible highlight of our sightseeing experiences! Still on our “bucket list” for Cape Town is another visit to Kirstenbosch to do more walking throughout the park.
On another Sunday evening, we went to a performance by the Cape Town City Ballet, which was also performed in an outdoor park setting. The performances of Solitaire and Graduation Ball drew on the talents of a large company of dancers. In this park setting, there were actual seats and lighting to enhance the experience.
We have only been to one movie and interestingly, here you purchase assigned seats. The first time we attempted to go, we waited until we were ready to go in to buy tickets, only to find out that all the “good” seats were sold and there were only front row seats left. We planned ahead the next time. The movie we saw was “The Descendants” with George Clooney, which we both enjoyed.
On Saturdays, we usually drive to a destination away from the city proper. One Saturday, we drove to Cape of Good Hope, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans converge. The Cape is renown for the large number of ships that have lost their way here and sunk. The vistas are quite wonderful, but similar to being by other oceans, you are nearly blown away. Rob was able to get a sample of ocean water for the annual merging of waters ceremony in the fall at his church, Unity Church Unitarian.
The route we took when we drove to the Cape was along Chapman’s Peak, which is a toll road along the Atlantic coast that is cut into the mountain range. The views are incredible, with many pull-off points. The day we took this route, we encountered a multitude of bicyclists, which made the narrow 2-lane road even more harrowing. We learned that most of these cyclists were in training for the Cape Argus Bicycle race, which was held on March 11th. Over 35,000 cyclists participated in this 105 km race. Currently, there is a lot of controversy in Cape Town about this toll road because the company that owns it wants to build a 2-story toll plaza on the site. Low and behold this is a national park and residents have chained themselves there and gone on hunger strikes to get the city to halt the building. A Norwegian living in Cape Town contacted UNESCO in an effort to halt construction, but yet it has continued.
Joan (Rob too, although he would deny it) has actively pursued visiting craft shops and craft production locations. We visited a pottery factory that provides hand painted pottery and scored with some hardly noticeable seconds. It was interesting to watch the men doing the hand painting with minute, intricate designs. We also searched for and found (but closed that day) a place that produces unique craft items composed of used tea bags painted with beautiful abstract designs. We are bringing home some coasters, so look under your drinks when you visit. The city has some large areas where crafts are sold in downtown and at the waterfront. Lots of wood carved animals, wire creations, beaded items and masks. In many ways, it is remarkable how many different crafts are sold in this city. It seems like many NGOs have launched income generation projects for poor, unemployed women who live in the shacks out on the flats and you wonder how there can be a market for so much of this stuff. In addition to the shops, there are many craft fairs on streets and in parks, usually on the weekends. Near the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront are some of the nicer shops, most likely because lots of tourists are drawn to this area and of course, cruise ships dock here and their passengers disembark and enjoy the fine restaurants and shops. In general, the waterfront is a festive area because there are several areas where there are street performers – a variety of musicians and dancers usually.
Joan has been to two of the townships (and Rob visited one) out on the Cape Flats where Wola Nani has an orphan and vulnerable children (OVC) after-school programme. At one site, a large sea container has been fitted with a door and some windows and some drop-leaf tables. Each day a couple of the staff prepare a meal, such as a meat and vegetable stew, to feed to the kids when they come. For many of the kids, this is their primary meal for the day. One site is adjacent to a government health clinic. The ground outside the building is sand piles and gravel. There are the makings of a vegetable garden apparently started by someone at the clinic, but it appears to be dying from lack of attention. Another adjacent building was a clinic for TB run by the Desmond Tutu TB agency. The Phillipi township has an estimated 150,000 residents. It was developed in the 1980s as a place for blacks to live when they were moved out of the central city by the Dutch. However, its historical roots apparently go back to a German settlement in the mid 1800s. The streets are paved with proper sewage. Some housing is three story cement buildings needing paint, but most are "informal houses," which are essentially tin roofed shacks that may or may not have running water, but all have electricity. Along the main streets people have set up small shops, mostly small shipping containers for businesses, food, beauty shops, repair shops, etc. Also within the boundaries of this particular township is a large growing area that provides about 80% of the fresh veggies for Cape Town. Many people who live here work in the fields. There is an ongoing struggle over who owns the land that the informal houses are on.
As people from the rural areas flocked to the cities, townships were formed outside of the main part of the city. Some started in the early 1900s, but when apartheid was begun, blacks and coloureds could not live in the white-defined areas of the city and so the townships grew in size as blacks were sent out of the white areas.
It is amazing to us how the whites could ever had thought that apartheid was the right thing to do and to allow the millions of blacks to be relocated into these appalling townships. Khayelitsha is another well known township west of Cape Town where over 500,000 folks live, mainly in shacks but with some middle class housing. In Philippi (where the OVC project is), we saw some government housing as well, usually 2-3 story cement block structures that looked even worse than the shacks. There is understandably a lot of tension in Cape Town around the lack of (or slow) progress to improve living conditions for the blacks primarily and the coloureds who live in these township areas. Unemployment is unacceptably high and of course, those with little/no education are disproportionately affected – 25.4% overall, but 59% for blacks, 37% for coloured and 3.6% for whites. Like most of the world, the recession has exacerbated unemployment and there are many articles in the newspaper with “expert” remedies.
One big danger is fires. Almost every week there is a report of fires in the townships and they lose 10-15 shacks with every fire. The winds can be incredibly strong and when it is cooler in the evenings, people sometimes use candles to keep warm and these can be left unattended. One day at Wola Nani, one of the lay counselors (who works for Wola Nani in one of the public health clinics doing HIV testing) called to say that her shack had burned down the night before. She lost everything and yet she showed up at work the next morning!
