A Week in Cape Town: Mountains, Mandela & Minstrel Day

 

     A week in Cape Town isn’t enough. With 45 years of travelling behind me and countless iconic cities around the globe visited, Cape Town takes the cake.  The city and its tourist operators can crow all they want, because it is truly all it says it is. It’s a city that’s pinioned against a great glowering flat-topped mountain, rolls to the sea over another, cone-topped one, and skids to a stop against the thundering Atlantic. It’s both wild and sophisticated, with recent developments earning the city the title of World Design Capital in 2014.

   What is unique about the city is that while you can imagine how splendid the city must appear from above, you can actually confirm your imaginings by walking up a mountain – Lion’s Head – that rises like an obelisk in the middle of town. From there, 360 degree views of the city (as the hike spirals up the side of the mountain, rotating your views of it) are the icing of the proverbial cake that is Cape Town.

A Week in Cape Town:  Minstrel Day

     When we reach our digs in Bo Kaap – an area

settled by the Cape Malay slaves when they were freed in 1834 and remains to this day a proud Muslim area of the city – we hear the sounds of a brass band. A really good, all stops out, brassband. Postponing full inspection of our Cape Town hideaway, we drop our bags in the entryway, find our way out of the complex, and hunt down the music. We find it spilling forth from an alleyway borne by a collection of brightly costumed brass and woodwind players and drummers, accompanied by an enthusiastic entourage of dancers, shakers, and merry-makers. They are practising for Minstrel Day – January 2 – when the whole city busts loose to celebrate what had originally been the only holiday in the year given a slave. It’s music and dance at its most electric, all within two hours of our arrival in Cape Town!

A Week in Cape Town:  Mountains

     Our Cape Town explorations are a delicious mixture of the outdoors, the museums and the street life. Due to the weather and its good looks, we walked most days through Cape Town. It was ten minutes to the city bowl (downtown centre), forty minutes to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront (tourist centrepiece of Cape Town) and a circuit around entire waterfront of city – from Camps Bay to City Bowl – took two-and-a-half hours.

     We also set off by foot up the face of Table Mountain, swept up in the tide of everyone else who thinks the trail is gonna be an easy way to save $30.00. Unbeknownst to most of the climbers, I’m sure, is that in the hot noonday sun, the trail is a ballbreaker!! The climb is steep, relentless, has no cover, very little shade, and you will feel like the chain gang snagged in molasses if you do it in high season (when every visitor to Table Mountain between the ages of 15-35 walks one way). Earlier ambitions of perhaps returning by foot are immediately scuttled when we reach the top, and I brave the fear-of-heights-when-it-involves-unknown-machines-and-operators with a swing back down the mountain via the state-of-the-art cable car (which rotates as you descend, so everyone at one point gets a front row seat).

A Week in Cape Town:  Victoria & Alfred Waterfront

     Explorations of the city were at our doorstep; just metres away from the quiet streets of our neighborhood we would be in the cauldron of the city core. Like everywhere else in Africa, there is a story- book energy and colour that is much more ‘hectic’ than Canadian or European streets where people tend to cocooned in conversation with real or wi-fi companions. Expect a lot more interaction, hustling, and just plain excitement.The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront vibrates with the sounds of buskers playing marimbas, djembes, and singing and dancing in glorious Ladysmith Black Mombaza fashion. The Victoria & Alfred Market, a fresh food and produce market where artisan coffee rubs shoulders with gourmet samosas and vegan icecream, and The Watershed, a cool industrial space that houses 150 shops selling locally designed goods, are also highlights of this cleverly refurbished district of the city. As is the moment you sink into one of the wharfside bistros to sample the wonderful and so-reasonably-priced wines of South Africa – a third the cost of a glass of wine in B.C. (on par with the price differential in general we found between Canada and South Africa, except for accommodation in Cape Town).

A Week in Cape Town:  Museums

     Some of our best walks through town were on guided tours. Free guided tours. Seems this idea is springing up, mushroom-like, in virtually every

major city in the world. We were first introduced to this new phenomenon in Romania. The idea is brilliant: show up for a city tour at a designated major square in town, walk for two hours, learn copious amounts about the town and the culture from the idiomatic perspective of a local guide, and tip them according to what you felt was the value of the tour.

     In Cape Town, we were introduced to certain aspects of South African history, and later, on our own time, would wander into the museums that documented that history. The ‘king’s corridor’ in The Company’s Garden flows past the parliament buildings, the office of the President (Tuynhuys), the National Art Gallery, Museum and Library, and the Jewish Museum. The hallowed walk beneath the giant rubber and eucalyptus trees traces a line of history one can feel taut with tension and revision, and now, reconciliation. Conveniently close by is The Slave Lodge, where the gardeners and tenders of public works in the colonial period were housed in small, dark and airless quarters. Further down the road is The District Six Museum, where, in more recent times, the apartheid government decided that land adjacent to the harbour was far too valuable real estate for the black and coloured

population that lived there. As a result, Fairyland (called that because this neighborhood of mixed and diverse backgrounds was an unusually harmonious one) was dismantled, 60,000 people dispersed to the outlying areas. Interestingly, the museum is manned by people once displaced by this government edict – pretty powerful stuff.

A Week in Cape Town:  Nelson Mandela

      Of course, you cannot go to South Africa without attempting to understand more about Nelson Mandela and his legacy. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, with an entire wing devoted to Mandela and his early activism and involvement in the ANC, reminded us of how pivotal Mandela was to 20^th century South African history and the dissolution of the apartheid system. He was considered a natural leader; firm, courteous with views always based on thought and reason. After the Sharpeville

Massacre in 1960, the ANC was banned, causing Mandela to continue his work underground. At the Rivonia Trial in 1964, he was convicted of treason – guilty of 221 acts of sabotage designed to overthrow the arpartheid system – and sentenced to life in prison on Robben Island.

     Today, Robben Island is a Unesco World Heritage Site, probably the most visited ‘pilgrimage’ site’ in South Africa . We were only able to visit because of extra tours that had been put on over the busy Christmas holiday season. The boat and buses were packed. A former inmate conducts the tours of the penitentiary, and Mandela’s cell, outdoor exercise area and limestone quarry in which all inmates were sent to work, brings home to visitors the stark and friendless conditions that faced Mandela for 27 years of his life. But like every great person, he let the isolation prompt study and self-improvement, turning ‘the school of

hard knocks’ into ‘a university of spiritual discovery’, for both himself and fellow inmates. He tells us that by using the time to focus on an inner journey towards honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility and generosity, his perspectives became more philosophical and forgiving. When he was released, strategically by President de Klerk in 1990 to avert the real threat of racial civil war, he exonerated the government for his incarceration, giving him martyr-like status around the world. We found it so inspiring to travel in a land that had had such a wise and prescient leader.

A Week in Cape Town:  Miscellaneous Wonders

     Our beautiful pad in Cape Town – a three-story loft-like townhouse with wrought iron staircases, a four-poster bed, and a rooftop terrace the peered down into the city and baked in the afternoon sun – was sadly underused while in CapeTown. There was always something else that needed to be seen or done. We learned to frequent the Eastern Food Bazaar, where you could get falafel and humus, bunny chows, chicken malasa, etc. with rice, dahl and salad for incredible prices (average price for full meal: $5.00). For access to the famed Kirstenbosch Gardens and the oldest winery in South Africa – Groot Constantia –

we exchanged the Citi-Bus for the Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus (which again, was very reasonably priced, and takes you far beyond the city limits). To get down the Cape Peninsula as far as the penguins (Boulders), we ventured onto the Metro Line – the archaic, and graffiti riddled commuter train that services the townships.

     And to mark the holy season, we attended a production of Messiah in St. George’s Cathedral,

where Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmund Tutu had served as its main canon (and Archibshop of Cape Town) from 1986-1996. A gorgeous building, a sell-out crowd, a superb orchestra, well-trained choir, convincing and young soloists – this was in many ways the culmination of our journey to South Africa. A rainbow nation, their reconcilation inspired and toiled for by people like Mandela and Tutu, offering, as if in communion, one of the world’s most powerful redemptive masterpieces of music. We stand in awe, Cape Town, South Africa.  (and of photographer and partner, Ken Flagel, who is responsible for many of the photos seen on this site)