15 August - Exploring Cape Town

I can confirm that having a bed to lie on makes a difference to how well you sleep; I woke after a solid night's sleep ready to face a day exploring the city.

Today’s plan was simple: catch the hop-on hop-off tour bus and learn something of Cape Town or the ‘Mother City' as they seem to call it here. We headed through the city and up Table Mountain, the long winding road leading up to the cable-car area strewn with parked cars all along its route from all the locals clearly making the most of the weather. Most of those on the bus disembarked to join the madness of people at the cable-car. I stayed on and we headed back down and then out along the western coastline of the cape, rugged and rocky with clear blue, wild sea but with occasional bays of beautiful white sandy beaches around which the various towns had grown up: Camps Bay, Clifton, Bantry Bay, Sea Point. It was then back into Cape Town via the waterfront area that I had visited yesterday.

I then changed buses for the second route which took me out through District 6 and to the forested area to the south of the city passing farmland and wine country and past one of the remaining townships, small, cramped and densely packed single story structures - they hardly deserve the name buildings - of wood and canvas and corrugated iron. It seems these townships grew up in the apartheid era because they provided accessibility to the places and homes where the black population worked, the areas that they were 'officially' homed in being too far away and without any work opportunities

The tour then continued to the coast that I had previously seen a couple of hours earlier so I hopped off at a little place called Haut Bay, a small fishing community nestled in a bay in the hills and remarkably Mediterranean in its appearance, where I had lunch overlooking the sea. Despite it being winter the weather has been glorious since I have been here, unusually so according to the taxi driver that brought me from the airport. I sat on a balcony in the sunshine looking across the nearby beach while eating my plate of grilled Kingklip - a local fish from the area - before catching another bus for the return to Cape Town and to relax at the hotel.

 

Now, as far as tours go it was not as informative as some: there was a little too much emphasis on trying to sell you the next 'must do' trip and the prerecorded narrative was often interrupted with stretches of African themed music which included Toto (obviously...) and what I assume to be a local song with the lyrics 'Nelson Mandela, he’s a hell of a fella'. The writer must have worked hard on that one... Adverts and naff music aside here are a couple of interesting snippets I learned on the local language: Afrikaans was not long ago described as the world's ugliest language by a British media executive who owned a 'lifestyle' magazine and as a result subsequently lost advertising from theAfrikaner Chairman of the company responsible for Mont Blanc, Cartier and Alfred Dunhill; and Afrikaans is an old language with a mix of old Dutch, Malay and African yet the oldest written Afrikaans is in Arabic - I’m not sure how that works but it’s what we were told..