Tuesday, 29 July 1986: Visit to the Cape of Good Hope Was Way Too Short

Sunday, August 17, 10:15AM, Mafeking train station. 

The tour bus to the Cape of Good Hope was actually better than I’d expected.  It cost R28 (US$11.20) and left a little after 9:00AM  There were 18 people on the brand new luxury bus, less than half capacity but not surprising considering it was the middle of winter and given the current paucity of tourists in South Africa.  Fred, the driver, was full of interesting information through his attempts at humor often fell flat.

As we started down Adderley Street, one of the main streets of Cape Town, Fred said it was named for a British politician who had talked his government out of turning Cape Town into a penal colony back in the early days.  I’m glad the guy had good taste!  Fred said that 800 trains per day go in and out of the Cape Town station.  This city has the best commuter rail system in the country.  Signal Hill, which I visited two days earlier, was named for the canon which is still fired every day at noon from its summit.  It was originally a signal to the local farmers that it was lunch time or some such nonsense.  Fred pointed to Robbin Island out in the bay, but it was interesting that he didn’t say anything about its being a prison or that Mandela had been held there for many years.  He talked about the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Sea Point community – lots of Italians, Greeks, etc. live there.  I wanted to call out, “What about blacks, Indians, and coloureds, Fred?”  I’m feeling very cantankerous these days, but manage to keep my mouth shut.  Sea Point looks like a great place to live:  beautiful setting, nice ocean (although too cold for swimming), crowded but clean big city feel and, from what I’ve heard, a vibrant night life.

Camps Bay (south of Sea Point) with a patch of morning fog in the bottom center of the photo.   Behind the town are the Twelve Apostles, the mountain range extending south from Table Mountain toward the Cape of Good Hope.

 

We continued south along the scenic Atlantic coast passing the little community Llandudno.  According to Fred, Cape Town’s only nude beach, Sandy Bay, is located here.  Around the next bend, the bus stopped for us to have a morning tea – a total waste of time as far as I was concerned since we had only left Cape Town less than an hour ago.  I needed my morning exercise more than tea, so I jogged back down the highway to get a photo and returned 15 minutes later in time to catch the bus. 

 A couple miles further down the road we reached the town of Hout Bay.  Here we had the option of taking a boat trip out to some rocks that were covered by seals.  What the hell, what’s another six rand?  The sea was choppy and I was laying on my stomach on the deck with one arm wrapped around the cable railing so as not to get pitched out.  It was a challenge using my 200mm telephoto lens to fire away at the seals under these conditions.  Definitely fun!

Seal Rocks in Hout Bay were covered with nesting birds and slumbering seals.

 

From Hout Bay south, the road was cut into sheer cliffs.  It reminded me of California Route 1 south of Big Sur.  It’s called Chapman’s Peak Drive and was built between 1915 and 1922.  The road hugs the cliffs for about six miles before it turns inland at Chapman’s Bay, a long, lovely and deserted sandy beach.  Along the Chapman’s Peak Road, Fred pointed out the pine and balsam forest which turned into shrubs as we continued south.  He also directed our attention to a kaolin mine and exotic Australian plants which had been planted to stabilize the sand.  These included blue gums and wattle.  We saw a coloured residential area, crayfish farm, and an area which is loaded with baboons that have adapted to eating shellfish. 

We entered the vast Cape Point Nature Reserve, an area of barren rocky hills and hardy grasses, which covers the bottom five or ten miles of the cape.  The game reserve was created to save the area from development.  A large fire last December had destroyed much of the vegetation at the north end of the reserve.  Apparently, this was not a great disaster as it is part of the natural process.  The constant winds down here at the southwestern tip of Africa probably keep trees from growing but there are an abundance of white and yellow flowered bushes.

We stopped for lunch just before arriving at Cape Point.  I sat with Scottish newlyweds who were doing a quick two-week tour of South Africa.  We were joined by an English attorney about my age with a beard.  He talked a bit too much and seemed to think of himself as an expert on southern Africa (which he most definitely was not)

The bus only stayed about ½ hour at Cape Point, not long enough to suit me.  There was only time enough to take a shuttle up to the top of the hill overlooking the point.  No time to see the 19¼ million candle power light house, to walk on the trail way out on the point, or go over to the actual Cape of Good Hope tip which lies about ½ mile southwest of Cape Point.  I could have spent much of the day here.  It was an eerie feeling looking out over the Southern Sea and realizing there was nothing except water between us and Antarctica.

The Cape of Good Hope which the Portuguese explorer, Bartolomeu Dias, and his crew sailed around in 1487 – the first Europeans to do so.  View toward Cape Point and Antarctica, some 3700 miles (6000 km) to the south.

At the top of Cape Point, I climbed over the protective brick wall and out onto the cliff to shoot some photos.  It was a hundred or more foot drop down to the sea.  I’m sure the rest of the passengers thought I was fucking crazy.  And probably the rest of them had little interest in walking on the trails around the point.  It was not what you’d call an athletic-looking group.  Quite a few older folks, people with kids, newlyweds, etc. 

It was a warm (around 60°F), windy, sunny winter day on the cape.  As we started heading back north, low puffy clouds blanketed the Swartkop Mountains.  We returned to Cape Town via the False Bay (east) side of the cape.  Just north of the reserve boundary, Fred pointed out a tiny resort village down the beach far below the road.  The only way to get there was on foot.  A little further on, we were temporarily stopped by a group of baboons that were jumping up on cars. 

The first town we reached on this side of the cape was Simonstown, headquarters of the South African Navy.  Fred said Daphne class submarines, which had been sold to South Africa by “another” government, were stationed here.  What other government?  (I found out later it was France. Why was Fred so secretive?  Did he not want to potentially embarrass French tourists who might be ashamed that their country sold armaments to South Africa?)  We passed through several pretty towns built on mountainsides overlooking False Bay.  There were an abundance of white stucco homes.  One of the towns, Fish Hoek, is the only dry town (dry, as in no liquor sold or served) in South Africa.  There may be a number of conservative Christians in South Africa, but at least they generally are not uptight about booze.

We stopped at the historic Groot Constantia estate with its exemplary Cape Dutch architecture and old winery.  After touring the main house, the British lawyer and I went to look for the wine tasting.  It was not set up for our group.  The Springbok Atlas Tours brochure had said “wine on weekdays” at Groot Constantia, but that apparently meant you could BUY wine there.  We complained to Fred who encouraged us to comment on the misleading statement on our tour evaluation forms. 

Our final stop was at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens.  It was late in the afternoon and the sun had long since dipped behind Table Mountain.  What good was it to look at proteas and other native flowers when there was no sun to bring out the colors? 

I realized the next day that our drive back into Cape Town had taken us right past the infamous District Six, a former multi-racial community that was demolished several years ago as part of the government’s efforts to put each racial group into its own area.  There was a tremendous amount of resentment over the destruction of District Six.  As I saw from the summit of Table Mountain the following day, very little of it has been redeveloped.  It’s just blocks and blocks of vacant lots that were once a vibrant neighborhood.  It’s an outlandish example of South Africa’s misguided racial policies and the failure of a sick brand of social engineering.  But the bastards never learn.  According to one of my sources, they are still trying to relocate black people from “white areas” to places where “they will be able to develop to their potential as a separate group.”  Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.