Radiac's South African Adventure, Part 9
African Adventure Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Day Nine - Saturday 23rd October
The start of today was quite typical:
Paul: "We have a tour booked around Bo-Kaap today."
Me: "Around who?"
Paul: "I don't know, my book said something about it, so I booked it."
And I'm very glad he did.
When we arrived, we found out that Bo-Kaap is the Muslim area of Cape Town, and is home to the cape's first mosque. With many of the people who live there descended from Malay slaves, the area was declared a coloured area by the government, who started forced removals of the people to the townships outside Cape Town in order to re-use the land for the business city's hotels and skyscrapers.
We went to the Bo-Kaap museum first of all, where we were met by our tour guide. She led us around the small museum, where she explained some of the history of Bo-Kaap, explained some Muslim customs and then took us off on a short walk around the buildings in the area, pointing out various features and explaining everything, from why some windows have deeper window sills, to how the apartheid racial classification worked in practice. She even took us into a corner shop to buy us some Malay sweetmeats to try, and they were very tasty.
She was clearly very passionate on the subject, and, living in the area, seemed to know everyone who was there. This made the whole area seem very friendly, and I was impressed by the resulting sense of close community, something we see very little of in this country these days. After the previous days of the shopping malls and casinos of modern westernised South Africa, the whole experience was extremely valuable and fascinating, and it really gave me an insight into how the country used to work and how it works now.
Once the tour had ended, we drove over to the Waterfront and got a ferry to Robben Island. This went through many transitions - at one point it was a leper colony - but for most of its inhabited history it has been a prison of one sort or another. It is probably most famous for being the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for most of his sentence. It was a very good and worthwhile experience, where we were led around and shown what's on the island and given a small amount of history, before being taken on to meet a former inmate who discussed his experiences. The whole trip was good right up to the point when the former prisoner told us that his book was on sale in the gift shop, which somewhat destroyed the atmosphere of the place.
That evening we met up with my art teacher from my first school (a friend of Paul - they had worked in the same building at the same school for 12 years), and we had an extremely tasty dinner out at the first restaurant that I had visited in South Africa that sold something other than pasta, pizza or burgers. I ordered some kingklip (like cod) with melted cheese, and it was delicious. I then couldn't decide between the four different types of chocolate pudding, so I went with the waitron's advice and had the 'Chocolate Nemesis' - very nice.
Day Ten - Sunday 24th October
Today we met up again with my art teacher and her husband - although they were on a tour of South Africa, they had the day off, and since Paul had a car, we all spent it travelling around the cape. Our plan was originally to go up Table Mountain for breakfast, but unfortunately the cable cars were all closed and they advised against walking up, so we moved to the next thing on our list - Chapmans Peak Drive, one of the most scenic costal drives in the world, and in parts it really was quite stunning. Then on to Simonstown, where we visited Boulders Beach, home to African penguins - they started off about 20 years ago with just 2 pairs, but they breed like bunnies so now there's about 3000 of them. Although I had seen penguins before, they had not been in the wild, but since these ones were just lying around on the beach and not running off into the ocean I wasn't too impressed.
We then went on through to the Cape of Good Hope National Park. Which, as you may have guessed, covers the end of the cape. This national park is apparently home to zebras and eland and various antelopes, but they must have all been out for the day because all we saw were baboons and tortoises. Got to Cape Point, took lots of photos of it and the Cape of Good Hope just across the bay, and then we went and had lunch in a restaurant there.
On the way back to Cape Town, we stopped at Cecil Rhodes' home, the house where he died. He was sent to South Africa from England due to ill health, got rich mining diamonds, consolidated the various mines into De Beers Consolidated Mines, becoming one of the richest men in the British Empire. He was one of the great empire builders, basically founding Rhodesia (named after him, and which at one point consisted of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) by getting mining rights and permission from Britain to colonise it and its resources, and he became Prime Minister of the cape colony. He was a big character in the history of Britain and Southern Africa, helping in the Boer War and working on his vision of running a railroad from the Cape to Cairo and getting the whole of Africa under British control. But he died at the age of 49, with the words "So little done, so much to do". The museum was small but packed with information about him and his life, and was a fascinating insight into the earlier history of the cape from the other side of the coin to the Bo-Kaap slaves.
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