Exploring Cape Town

Well, we must by now have walked our socks off - if we'd had any on to begin with. We've spent the past three days walking all around the City. We've explored :-

• the highly colourful, mainly Muslim, Bo Kaap area, otherwise known, if slightly misleadingly, as the Cape/Malay area - misleading because most of the freed slaves who were allowed to settle here were from Indonesia and India, rather than Malaysia - but an area which was, unexpectedly, very evocative in appearance of some of the tiny terraced streets around the North Laines area of Brighton (apart from the number of Mosques here in Bo Kaap, of course);

 

• the Robben Island museum (we're booked to visit the island itself in a few days' time) which explains the history of this penal/leper/lunatic asylym colony during the colonial/slave-trading centuries leading up to its recently more notorious history in housing many figures in the ANC's leadership - including of course Nelson Mandela, perhaps one of its most internationally-famous inmates, as well as one of the greatest thinkers and statesmen of all times;

 

• the Parliament/Company's Gardens central area (the 'company' being the Dutch East India company), which included the rather fascinating South Africa National Library;

 

• the Iziko Slave Museum, which also houses a fascinating history of the life of Oliver Tambo, a colleague of Mandela's, who always believed himself to be holding the ANC leadership 'in trust' for Mandela, and whose leadership style, integrity and philosophy (albeit, for many years a leadership-in-exile) still shines as a bright beacon for the rest of the world's leaders.

 

• and many more places around the Waterfront area which we mentioned in the last posting - and where, just yesterday, we bumped into an old colleague of Andy's from his BT days (his name's Kev Lewis for those of Andy's mates who remember him from the BT Wholesale team which met regularly in Chester). How small the world is!

 

We're also getting very familiar with using the rather bizarre mini-bus system here. It seems to be mainly used by Black Cape Townians and a few working- class Whites or foreign Backpackers, rather than the middle-class White South Africans. These sometimes rather dilapidated mini-buses career around the main streets at breakneck speed, beeping their horns or shouting out from the windows to get people's attention, stopping with a great squeal of breaks whenever someone hails them, and dropping people off wherever they want (as long as it's somewhere on the main routes they ply) for a flat-rate fare of R7 - about 42p - per person! We've used them at least twice a day since Monday, and have found their drivers and 'getter-inner' accomplices to be very helpful, cheerful and friendly.

Since the weekend, the weather has been a little cooler and cloudier, and we've had a couple of days of rain - which means that Table Mountain has been wearing its 'tablecloth' of cloud for most of that time. Oh, and we've also learned a little more about the dassies on Table Mountain, both from Mike's comments, and from Nini and Roy's e-mail, which explains that they are also to be found in the Drakensburg Mountains, which we're hoping to visit later on in our travels (so, you see, you can't always believe what you read on the information placards in tourist areas - which had initially convinced us that the dassies were ONLY to be found on Table Mountain, and absolutely nowhere else in the world!). 

 

(Editor's note: Dassies found the following day, while whale-watching! Great pics will follow.)

 

Okay, time for bed - we're off on a day-trip to Hermanus tomorrow, hopefully to do some whale-watching - even though it's right at the end of the migration season, we're hoping that the unseasonally cold and damp spring might have confused them enough to stay around for a little while longer. So, more anon......