Wednesday, 30 July 1986: High above Cape Town on a Clear Winter Day

 I met Barend Toerien early Wednesday at his flat on Queen Victoria Street.  With rucksacks, hiking boots, and my full array of camera gear, we headed up the road from the city to the lower cableway station.  The 1244 meter cable car ride takes six minutes.  There are two large cars which hold about 25 people each.  One goes up while the other is coming down on a separate line.  Although much older, the system is reminiscent of the Lion’s Head Gondola in Vail, Colorado minus the ski racks, of course.  Most people ride both ways as the hike down is long and steep. 

Because we were there early on a weekday, there was no long queue for the ride, and we were up on top in a flash.  It was a bit on the touristy side with coin-op binoculars, railings at the edge of the cliffs, picnic tables and a restaurant.  Nonetheless, the stone buildings were unobtrusive, and the view was wonderful.  To the north, the city of Cape Town spread over the hills and plains between the mountain and Table Bay.  The view to the east included white suburbs and the black, coloured, and Indian townships of Cape Flats with the rugged coastal mountain ranges on the skyline.  Fashionable Camps Bay and the Atlantic Ocean were to the west.  With the sun in the northern sky, the best view was to the south.  It included False Bay, the magnificent Twelve Apostles peaks immediately adjoining Table Mountain, and the Cape of Good Hope with Cape Point barely visible about 30 miles distant.

View north of part of Cape Town from the summit of Table Mountain.  Lion’s Head on the left, Signal Hill on the right, and Robbin Island in the upper center.

 

View west of Camps Bay looking down from Table Mountain.

 

The weather was near perfect for a mid-winter’s day:  sunshine with a few clouds, a brisk breeze, and the temperature around 55°F.  I spent at least ½ hour running film through my Pentaxes while Barend, who’d seen it all many times before, waited patiently in the restaurant nursing his morning coffee. 

Then we were off for a walk across the “table top” to its eastern edge some two miles distant.  There were no trees on this windswept summit, but tall grasses and flowering plants were everywhere in evidence interrupted here and there by sandstone outcrops.  We came across a few puddles, remnants of recent rains and snow.  The latter is uncommon and doesn’t last long.

View across the “Table Top” – the top of Table Mountain, 3,500 feet (1000+ meters) above the city of Cape Town.

 

At the eastern edge of the mountain, we descended down steep cliffs to the saddle separating Table Mountain from neighboring Devil’s Peak.  Fortunately, Barend knew the route well.  I would have felt more comfortable with a rope over one particularly steep stretch.  Once over the cliffs, we found a trail which switch-backed down several hundred meters to the road.  It was now lunch time, and I was famished.  We hitched a ride back to Barend’s car two miles distant.  Around 3:00, we arrived back downtown and made for a hotel on Green Market Square where we enjoyed a couple of frosty brews and fat burgers with chips.

I’m down-climbing Table Mountain.  Photo by Barend Toerien.

 

So, Cape Town is one of those rare cities like Boulder, Colorado where one can enjoy some great mountain hiking just a few minutes out of town.  Unlike Boulder, you can also enjoy some great sailing just a few minutes out of town.  Too bad this beautiful city is in such a politically fucked-up country.

I needed to get back up to Johannesburg to iron out any last minute details regarding my University of Botswana teaching job.  My train left the next (Thursday) morning.  I thought about spending my last night in a singles’ bar at Sea Point, a high-rise apartment area a couple miles from my old downtown hotel.  In the meantime, I ran into Peter, an American writer who was also staying at the Café Royal.  I offered to buy him a beer and he accepted.

Peter and I had met a couple days earlier.  He was a casual, good-looking, blond New Yorker, single, around age 35.  Peter had travelled south from Kenya over the course of several months.  His next destination was India as soon as he received a new Master Card from the States to replace the one he had lost.  In the meantime, he’d been hanging around Cape Town for some six weeks.  He was getting sick of the city in particular and South Africa in general by now.  Peter hadn’t spent nearly as much time in South Africa as I had, but he’d basically figured out what was going on there politically and socially.  Obviously, he’d picked up a few ideas from drinking in this bar with employees of the Cape Times, a liberal English-language newspaper with its offices across the street. 

Halfway into our first beer, the conversation turned to politics.  “Wish I could find someone who is fluent in Afrikaans and willing to accompany me to an AWB rally,” I lamented.  “I’d like to see what the real right-wing crazies in this country are all about.”

“I’ve been to one,” Peter replied.  “It reminded me of a wheel-tappers’ convention.”

 “A what?”

“You know, the white railway workers who tap the wheels of the passenger coaches with iron rods when a train is pulling into the station.”

“Yeah, what’s that all about anyway?”

“They’re listening for cracks in the wheels, as far as I know.  At any rate, it obviously doesn’t take much intelligence, and the people at AWB rallies look like a bunch of wheel-tappers.”

Peter didn’t seem to be all that impressed with Eugene Terre’Blanche, the neo-Nazi leader of the AWB.  He didn’t feel I’d really missed anything.

The conversation drifted over to Malawi which he’d visited on his way south.  I wondered if Peter felt that Hastings Banda, the 88-year-old President-for-life of Malawi, was still in firm control and also who would succeed him. 

 

By 1986, President Hastings Banda had ruled Malawi with an iron hand for the 22 years since its independence from Great Britain.

Photo source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Dr_HK_Banda%2C_first_president_of_Malawi.jpg

 

“Funny you should mention that,” Peter noted.  “I asked a journalist at a bar in Malawi about who was going to succeed Banda.  He replied, ‘That’s the one topic everyone here wants to know about.  And it’s the one topic we never discuss.’  Then he promptly picked up his drink and moved to another seat.”

Peter and I had two more beers and adding that to the two I’d had earlier with Barend, I was now in no condition to act civilized at a singles’ bar.  He was meeting some friends that night, so I went out by myself for some curry at a corner carry-out, then hit the hay.