So as it is with all good things, this one had come to an end. Need to catch up before reading on?
- Read Part I of this series here
- Read Part II of the series here
- And read about the Bring the Elephant Home program and our goals for the trip: What happens when you drop a fence
Thursday night: I landed in Cape Town at 9:30 at night, amid warnings that “the city isn’t safe” and “don’t walk alone” and, especially, “whatever you do, do not hike on Table Mountain alone. There are muggings.”
This last one bit me in the butt a little because one of the things I most wanted to do here in Cape Town was to hike up Table Mountain. So I spent the bulk of my return from Kariega wondering what I was going to do in Cape Town if exploring, hiking, or wandering aimlessly through the city wasn’t safe. I had 3 full days to fill, and I had only a short list of things to do and see.
Thing 1: Penguins. The only species of penguins in all of Africa resides on the southern end of the continent, with the bulk of them living on the Western Cape of South Africa. The African penguin sits squarely on the endangered list, with IUCN indicating that their numbers are in decline. The weird-looking critters were close enough to see, tourists be damned, so I was going to see them!
Thing 2: Table Mountain. Table Mountain and its foothills run like a rugged spine down the Cape, creating a dramatic backdrop. The unique formula of raging unemployment, governmental mis-management, and a drug problem of crisis proportions plus myriad tourists running around the city with giant dollar (euro, pound) signs emblazoned onto their foreheads has equaled a not-so-minor crime problem in this city. I’m of course (unironically) watering down the problem to a few key factors, which have exacerbated during the major drought in this part of the world these past few years. And so, even though there were too many reports of crime on the trails to ignore, I was determined to see the mountain somehow.
Thing 3: The southernmost point. To date, the most-southern point I’d ever been in the world was Kenton-on-Sea, in the Eastern Cape, where I had just come from. So to know that I was really, really close to the southwestern tip of the whole African continent, meant that I just had to try to get there over the next few days.
I have to note that during my 9:30pm ride from airport to guesthouse, I saw on the streets: Not. A. Soul. It was eerie, actually. The car stopped on the deserted street outside the guesthouse, and the Uber driver waited, wordlessly, out of the car, for me to get buzzed-in before he drove off. I was fried, a little sun-scorched, and missing the eles already. So I crashed – hard – and decided to figure out the next few days…tomorrow.
Friday. The easiest (and, as I was advised, safest) way to get around Cape Town is via an Uber. If I had enough days and fewer fears, I probably would have looked into the local train. And I frankly just avoided the “hop on-hop off” bus because I was really just looking for a less herd-like touristic experience. So, app in hand, I Ubered it down from Cape Town to the famous Boulders Beach and its resident population of penguins.
Truth be told, I’ll give the boardwalk out to see the penguins and Boulders a meh. After a hundred metres or so of wall-to-wall selfies with penguins, one can turn around and exit through the gift shop. The beach protection is needed, though, since there are fewer than 11,000 breeding pairs of these penguins remaining and the species could go extinct in the next decade or so. About 10% of the entire population lives right there. I didn’t do a count, but there were a lot of the strange little flightless waterbirds on the beach. 🐧
It was nice to discover a longer path outside of the main area, off the beach and away from the crowd. This path wends its way through some protected penguin nesting areas, where it’s possible to observe the little nuggets without bothering them. It was a surprisingly noisy, yet peaceful, experience: penguins are louder than one might imagine, and there were few tourists down this way, so I’d call it a win. I even encountered what the locals call a dassie…the African hyrax!
Highlight of the afternoon: a stroll back along the path and up to another beach, this time sans tourists. Here, I found a smaller colony of penguins lounging and playing on the rocks and sand. Weird insight: I can now attest that neither penguin courtship nor sex is a quiet sport.
The one thing that stuck with me that day was a conversation with the Uber driver. I had spent the morning with a migraine and got into the car slightly subdued and groggy from a nap. The driver was amiable enough, and so as he drove, we chatted, and he mentioned that he lived in a township just outside the city. I asked how it was, and he answered, “It’s poor but okay. I’m saving money for my family.” We talked about the expansive beaches, white sharks, the recent forest fires…as the subject changed from where do you stay to more touristic things, I thought little of the conversation until later the next day.
Saturday. It was About an hour into my day-long tour with an amazing local guide, Shafiek from In2Africa Tours (hint: if you are in Cape Town, please let me know and I’ll get you his contact info!), that he began to talk about the neighbourhoods and communities in and around Cape Town – and the social structures therein.
And so, I learnt a new definition I didn’t know I needed. Until that moment, I hadn’t realised that here, a “township” is no more than a favela or shantytown, remnants of worker housing encampments established during apartheid, now transformed into sprawling stretches of shacks and tin-roofed huts, interspersed with rubbish heaps, precariously spiderwebbed together by pirated electrical and cable lines. People live here because even though Apartheid ended 30 years ago this week, wage disparity, majority white land ownership, and rampant unemployment prevail.
It made me feel self-conscious, privileged, a little bit ashamed.
Having done a lot of work in affordable housing at home, it also struck me not for the first time this trip, that while where I was in South Africa didn’t really feel like Africa-Africa, its first-world façade hides the cracks underneath. Back home too. A clean, comfortable, safe place to live is a basic human necessity. Maslow, meet Cape Town.
Putting out of mind for the moment the things that were entirely out of my control, I focused on trying to muster excitement towards the day’s itinerary: another trip down the coast, but this time all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point via the Atlantic side, and a checklist of sights to see and things to do. My guide did an amazing job of creating an itinerary of less-touristy, nature-oriented attractions. The day went well: we wended our way through the different coastal towns, the cliffside homes looking precarious on the rocky slopes. A small boat ride took me to see a nearby harbour island called Seal Island, and its residents Arctocephalus pusillus, or Cape fur seals. The genus translates to “bear head”. Go figure.
Back on shore, we weaved our way across the beautiful Chapman’s Peak Drive, which was built into the side of the mountain in the early 1900s, only to be closed nearly a century later due to rockslides for more than a decade. Three Ts helped it come back to life in its current iteration: technology, tourists, and tolls, giving better commutes to locals and better access to the geological and botanical wonders of the mountain to all (or at least all who wish to pay for the privilege). Apparently 2 species of Fynbos occur here on the Cape and nowhere else on earth.
Down the Cape we went, passing Simons Town again, and landing at the Cape of Good Hope, where I ventured up to the old Cape Point lighthouse (the new one is apparently lower and brighter, hence safer!) and then down again via the absolutely lovely Kaap die Goeie Hoop-voetpad overlooking Dias beach, leading down to the Cape of Good Hope proper.
Unexpected animal behaviour.
In this part of the Cape, ostriches and baboons and eland live by the sea. And while there are “caution: baboons” signs everywhere, the individuals I saw seemed almost introspective, meditative. This group of baboons has apparently evolved to eat fish and mussels. Snacks snatched from unsuspecting tourists serve as fillers. Luckily, The baboons I observed seemed much more concerned with the ocean than with my snacks. Which I dutifully left in the car.
A note in an exhibit in the visitor center sums it up nicely:
Since the beginning of our species, our survival has depended on our knowledge of nature, our original Mother. All early humans understood nature intimately, and saw other species as kin. With the environmental crisis looming, now more than ever, we need to draw on our ancestors’ wisdom. We have compromised our life support system, which is the biodiversity of our planet. We need to rebuild our threads to the wild, because ultimately our connection to nature will determine our survival.
We need to remember that we are nature, we are not separate.
While it wasn’t the actual south-most point in Africa it was pretty darn close.
Animals, encountered; points, pinned; we headed back towards Cape Town on the False Bay side, stopping for photos in Muzienberg and some other scenic towns along the way before spending a few minutes wandering the early evening streets of Bo Kaap, the Muslim section of town, and grabbing some street food to bring back for dinner. With Ramadan in full swing and the shops closing early for iftar, the breaking of the fast, I had a plan for Monday morning before I headed to the airport: a visit to the much-renowned Atlas Spice Shop there.
Sunday arrived and I made a plan to see Table Mountain. I decided to take the cablecar up and down and do as much hiking at the top as I could. Sun shining, I crossed fingers against the potential for mid-afternoon fog that could envelop the mountaintop in minutes. After wandering around the close-to-base paths for a bit, I stumbled upon a trail snaking through the scrappy and rocky terrain and bounded by the Fynbos mentioned earlier. It felt like the moon, like being above treeline but here there are really no trees, regardless that it isn’t even that high (1,086 metres/3,563 feet), compared with highest peak in S. Africa at nearly 3x its height. Little black lizards darted around the rocks. I saw another couple of dassies. And some of the very alien-like king protea flowers! Few humans were on this section of trail, but I bumped into a small group of Brits and fell in with their local guide for a while. He was leading them to Maclear’s Beacon, the highest point of Table Mountain and used by cartographers as a triangulation station. The hike wasn’t terribly challenging, but checked the boxes next to “hike” and “views” for the day!
As I was decidedly not done exploring, I decided to venture to the waterfront.
It felt like adjectives juxtaposed in close proximity: sketchy and industrial, shmancy and touristy. A stark illustration of what lies just a scratch beneath the surface. So I wandered around the wharf (deemed safe, as evidenced by the preponderance of armed guards), ogled the ginormous seals on the dock, then ducked into a Turkish restaurant and had a fantastic late lunch before getting out of dodge.
Monday. I spent my last morning spice-shopping, getting harassed by creepy men on the streets of Bo Kaap, chatting with the lovely owner of the guesthouse, skritching the head of the neighbour’s lab puppy through the gate, and gratefully transiting to the airport for my flight home.
And like that the trip was at its end. This one felt too short: I wanted more time with nature, with the gentle giants back at Kariega, with the birds and the wild things. While I don’t feel any great need to go back to Cape Town, I have it in my heart to go back to Kariega and to work again with Bring the Elephant Home in the (foreseeable) future.
Just in case you don’t want to scroll all the way up to the top find the links to the earlier blogs from the trip:
- Read Part I of this series here
- Read Part II of the series here
- And read about the Bring the Elephant Home program and our goals for the trip: What happens when you drop a fence
And I’ve put loads of shots from this trip and beyond into my photography shop… you can order prints, cards and more of many of the pics in this post (and more). And use the code TGM-15 for a 15% discount.
Thanks for stopping by!