Sunday-Monday, 7-8 December 1986: Rental Car Provides Good Photo Ops

April 6, 2023, Denver, Colorado

I have no write up from December 1986 for my first couple days to the Cape Town area during my trip there for the month-long Christmas-New Year’s holiday at the University of Botswana.  However, I do have my slides and my expense book to help me reconstruct what I was doing.

Upon my the arrival of my overnight train in Cape Town, I picked up a VW from a rental agency so I could see more of the area around the Western Cape without being tied to bus and train routes and schedules.  I immediately headed south along the coast of the Cape Peninsula to Hout Bay which I’d visited back in July but without the freedom of my own wheels.  From there I continued another 10 km along the winding Chapman’s Peak Drive which is built right into sheer cliffs above the bay and the Atlantic Ocean.  The afternoon sunlight on the west-facing cliffs provided great photo opportunities.

          View south along Chapman’s Peak Drive with the Cape of Good Hope in the Distance.

 

I didn’t get very far down the coast before sunset and doubled back through Hout Bay to Constantia on the south side of Table Mountain.  I splurged on a room at the Hohenort Hotel (R44 or about US$22), a converted late 17^th Century farmhouse.

My route on December 8 took me along False Bay southeast of Cape Town.

 

The following day, I ventured further – about 60 km east to Sir Lowry’s Pass seeing beautiful coastal and mountain scenery on the north side of False Bay.  From Constantia, I headed south to the beach at Muizenberg on False Bay where a beach was being shared by whites and coloureds.  I wondered how that was allowed to happen but Cape Town seemed far more accepting of multi-racial mixing than most parts of the country.  From there, I drove east to Mitchell’ Plain and saw a vast expanse of apartheid housing reserved for coloured and Indian South Africans.

Boxes made of ticky-tacky that all look the same in Mitchell’s Plain, a coloured and Indian area southeast of Cape Town. 

 

Further east along the bay, I came to Strand, a long and lovely beach where the only users welcome were those with skin the color of the white sand.  A sign read, “BEACH AND SEA WHITES ONLY”.  The beach was virtually deserted except for a few windsurfers.  The highway continued southeast and climbed to Sir Lowry’s Pass where I had a great view of the Holderberge and Hottentots-Hollandeberge mountains. 

Strand Beach on the north shore of False Bay.  View east with the Hottentots-Hollandeberge Mountains in the distance.  

 

View north from Sir Lowry’s Pass, 55 km southeast of Cape Town. 

 

In the late afternoon, I returned to Constantia where I had made arrangements to stay for a week for a very modest fee at the Emissary Community, a new age group.  I had stayed with members of this group in Harare, Zimbabwe back in June.