Three words: CAPE TOWN ROCKS
Hello! Sorry for the long silence, but we are finally ready to tackle the mammoth task of sorting through over 600 photos and describing 12 awesome days for all of your viewing enjoyment…good thing there’s three of us! I, Christina, will be taking on the first four days: April 6th-10th. So without further ado…
We took off on the Thursday before the week-long semester/Easter break, landing in the mid-afternoon into the welcoming arms of Laura’s long-lost summer camp buddy, Edward Pickup. We got a little foreshadow of what was to come when we found out that Ed had asked his sister drive all the way out to the airport too, just in case we had too much luggage for our week-long stay to fit into one car. The Hospitality Extravaganza then continued with a welcome dinner at Ed’s parents house, where thankfully he lives at the moment, because let me tell you this was no frat house! Almost the entire lovely Pickup family was there: Mom (Marlene), Dad (Peter), Sister (Linzi), twin Brother (Rowland), and Rowland’s girlfriend Natalie. I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful it was to find ourselves guests at a family table in a beautiful home, eating delicious food and polishing off 6 bottles of some very nice local white wine. Ed had even vacated his loft room for us because it had space for three, and so after a brainstorming session in which the family generated an entire foolscap sheet full off suggestions on what to do during our visit (after about ten great ideas I felt I actually needed to grab a pen and start taking notes), we went to bed full of home-cooked goodness.
The next morning Marlene dropped us off at the Waterfront, which turned out to definitely be the place to start our lesson in Cape Town Appreciation. The Waterfront is a series of shops, restaurants, and condos all located along piers and docks behind a breakwater, with Table Mountain towering in the background. It made for some spectacular shots which you will find in our album ‘just now’ (i.e. nobody knows how long it’s going to take to get these pictures online, but definitely don’t hold your breath!). We had breakfast on the water at a restaurant which turned out to be conveniently located right next to the ticket centre and dock for boats to Robben Island, on which you may already know Nelson Mandela and other political opponents of the apartheid regime were imprisoned. We booked our tickets and then went to ‘kill time’ at the huge craft barns along the waterfront area. Let’s just say time wasn’t the only casualty of that excursion…but at least I can now report that after leaving everything for safekeeping back in Canada, my earring collection is back up to speed! Hoorah! In fact, I think we all got off pretty lightly considering all the super cool stuff there was in there, from yummy jellies to crystal mobiles to Zulu-hut shaped oil incense burners to wire crocheted necklaces to full-sized African drums (on which we caught Allison having a sneak practice session with the salesman).
I’ll admit, we had to tear ourselves away, which was accomplished mostly by lying to ourselves in self-convincing voices about how we would come back for sure. But Robben Island was not to be missed. While I starred fixedly at the horizon in a valiant effort to keep my lunch in my stomach, Laura and Allison enjoyed the view of Cape Town from the deck of the boat that took us across to the island in about 20 minutes. Because I needed to take a few minutes to say a little prayer of thanks to the solid ground beneath my feet on the other side, we ended up in the last group made up of fellow stragglers, but this turned out to be a blessing because the tour guide that we got for the walk-through of the prison was awesome. His name was Modise (pronounced moh-DEE-say) and he had been brought to the island as a prisoner (as have all the prison guides) when he was just sixteen years old. He took us through explaining how things were run and let us browse the series of tiny individual cells which have been set up with an original artifact and a letter posted on the wall by a person who had occupied that cell. He then sat us down in a common area which had been a room full of bunk beds in which he had been placed. He told us truly horrifying stories about how he had been interrogated and tortured. He spoke of the hatred that this had inspired, and how he had eventually been convinced away from the path of violent retaliation. The experience was made even more interesting by the presence of a group of white South Africans who, Modise told Laura privately as we were walking around, exhibited a family dynamic that he saw there quite often: two teenaged kids trying to see for themselves this place they’ve read about in school, dragging with them a reluctant and closed-faced father who looked pointedly off into the middle distance every time Modise tried to engage him with eye-contact. That became particularly interesting in retrospect when we learned that although it is now a regular excursion for local school groups at the government’s expense, many if not most South Africans our age and older have never made the trip. I guess that goes some way towards answering the question of why someone who was imprisoned on the island for five years would go back there and give tours reliving the experience day after day, to be part of the process of changing that.
Needless to say, we could all probably go on to describe this experience for quite some time, as evidenced by the fact that the above paragraph is huge and I haven’t even mentioned the bus tour that took us past the leper’s graveyard and the quarry where political prisoners were forced to turn limestone to gravel by hand day after day in the blazing sun, causing lasting lung and eye damage to all of them. Even we felt we hadn’t heard enough by the end of two hours, so I won’t even try. But Laura, aka Networking Queen, managed to get Modise’s contact information to meet for lunch the following week so that we’d have a chance to ask a few more questions and generally follow up on the experience. But I’ve got a whole weekend to describe here first, so more on that from Laura later.
Come to think of it, I really should pick up the pace because if I describe all the cool stuff we did in this kind of detail we’re going to be here all week! So, with a bit more brevity (feel free to post comments or send emails for further info ): that (Friday) night we started getting geared up to go out, but the double dose of Gravol I took in order to survive the boat trip home had left me totally brain-dead so I had to bow out of a visit to Ed’s eldest sister’s house…you’ll have to see picture descriptions or one of the other gal’s blogs for more on that, but I hear it was fun. Thankfully, I did manage to get it together just in time for our first night out in Cape Town at the now infamous Tiger Tiger. Ed’s friends were cool, and it did make for a cute picture and a really fun game of Disco (where you give each other activities to pantomime while disco-dancing). But the music was brutal (like, ACDC and the Beach Boys brutal) and by the end of the night, we resisted being dragged into a club full of teenagers only to return to Tiger Tiger where Laura ended up slapping the South African (lightweight, but still) cage-fighting champion full in the face! Apparently cage fighting makes you a little bit too comfortable with grabbing strangers. For some reason, it took Laura, Allison, a bartender and a manager to get him removed, but eventually he was gone. And so were we. Oh well, we met some cool “ou’s” (pronounced ‘ohs’, meaning dudes), had fun dancing, and there were many nights still to come…
Saturday saw a predictably bright and bushy start around noon to head off for a locally-guided tour of the Cape Peninsula by none other than our new best friend Ed and his friend Carlo. We managed to get the entire top half of the peninsula in before somebody mentioned cocktails and the party was relocated from the car to the Brass Bell, the gorgeous covered patio of which features in a few lovely, slantily-lit seaside shots. That evening was the finals of the Symphony of Fire featuring Spain, South Africa and…Canada! We pulled up a piece of embankment and had a great time watching the gorgeous display of some of the coolest fireworks I’ve ever seen. A little exhausted, we opted for movie rental that night (Mean Creek = lame), so we were nice and fresh the next morning for Laura to go surfing with Linzi before we resumed our peninsula tour. We had another delicious meal on the water, including huge veggie sandwiches and my first of the many plates of mussels I was to have on this trip, including some fresh, homebaked mussels handpicked by Marlene and Peter themselves that very night at our second fabulous hosted meal. We went and checked out a real live wild penguin colony at Boulder Beach, where for $4 you can actually go down to the water and swim alongside any penguins you happen to find. The water was frigid, but you bet I was in there (Laura had had enough that morning, Ed’s a local and Allison’s one of those ‘I hate cold water’ people. Phht! Come on! Penguins people, penguins!). Then that night we had a real good time at La Med, a sweet beach-front bar which is widely known as The place to go if you want to party but it unfortunately happens to be Sunday. For the second and not the last time the dancing went on until the wee hours of the morning, with good times being had by all.
Alrighty, Laura’s poised to take over for the next four days of our epic (thanks for the word, Jonno ) voyage. I will just conclude by saying out loud, in case it isn’t coming through loud and clear already, that this was definitely a highlight of our trip, due in no small part to the efforts of our hosts. Stay tuned for Part II of Cape Town Rocks!
Love,
Christina
We took off on the Thursday before the week-long semester/Easter break, landing in the mid-afternoon into the welcoming arms of Laura’s long-lost summer camp buddy, Edward Pickup. We got a little foreshadow of what was to come when we found out that Ed had asked his sister drive all the way out to the airport too, just in case we had too much luggage for our week-long stay to fit into one car. The Hospitality Extravaganza then continued with a welcome dinner at Ed’s parents house, where thankfully he lives at the moment, because let me tell you this was no frat house! Almost the entire lovely Pickup family was there: Mom (Marlene), Dad (Peter), Sister (Linzi), twin Brother (Rowland), and Rowland’s girlfriend Natalie. I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful it was to find ourselves guests at a family table in a beautiful home, eating delicious food and polishing off 6 bottles of some very nice local white wine. Ed had even vacated his loft room for us because it had space for three, and so after a brainstorming session in which the family generated an entire foolscap sheet full off suggestions on what to do during our visit (after about ten great ideas I felt I actually needed to grab a pen and start taking notes), we went to bed full of home-cooked goodness.
The next morning Marlene dropped us off at the Waterfront, which turned out to definitely be the place to start our lesson in Cape Town Appreciation. The Waterfront is a series of shops, restaurants, and condos all located along piers and docks behind a breakwater, with Table Mountain towering in the background. It made for some spectacular shots which you will find in our album ‘just now’ (i.e. nobody knows how long it’s going to take to get these pictures online, but definitely don’t hold your breath!). We had breakfast on the water at a restaurant which turned out to be conveniently located right next to the ticket centre and dock for boats to Robben Island, on which you may already know Nelson Mandela and other political opponents of the apartheid regime were imprisoned. We booked our tickets and then went to ‘kill time’ at the huge craft barns along the waterfront area. Let’s just say time wasn’t the only casualty of that excursion…but at least I can now report that after leaving everything for safekeeping back in Canada, my earring collection is back up to speed! Hoorah! In fact, I think we all got off pretty lightly considering all the super cool stuff there was in there, from yummy jellies to crystal mobiles to Zulu-hut shaped oil incense burners to wire crocheted necklaces to full-sized African drums (on which we caught Allison having a sneak practice session with the salesman).
I’ll admit, we had to tear ourselves away, which was accomplished mostly by lying to ourselves in self-convincing voices about how we would come back for sure. But Robben Island was not to be missed. While I starred fixedly at the horizon in a valiant effort to keep my lunch in my stomach, Laura and Allison enjoyed the view of Cape Town from the deck of the boat that took us across to the island in about 20 minutes. Because I needed to take a few minutes to say a little prayer of thanks to the solid ground beneath my feet on the other side, we ended up in the last group made up of fellow stragglers, but this turned out to be a blessing because the tour guide that we got for the walk-through of the prison was awesome. His name was Modise (pronounced moh-DEE-say) and he had been brought to the island as a prisoner (as have all the prison guides) when he was just sixteen years old. He took us through explaining how things were run and let us browse the series of tiny individual cells which have been set up with an original artifact and a letter posted on the wall by a person who had occupied that cell. He then sat us down in a common area which had been a room full of bunk beds in which he had been placed. He told us truly horrifying stories about how he had been interrogated and tortured. He spoke of the hatred that this had inspired, and how he had eventually been convinced away from the path of violent retaliation. The experience was made even more interesting by the presence of a group of white South Africans who, Modise told Laura privately as we were walking around, exhibited a family dynamic that he saw there quite often: two teenaged kids trying to see for themselves this place they’ve read about in school, dragging with them a reluctant and closed-faced father who looked pointedly off into the middle distance every time Modise tried to engage him with eye-contact. That became particularly interesting in retrospect when we learned that although it is now a regular excursion for local school groups at the government’s expense, many if not most South Africans our age and older have never made the trip. I guess that goes some way towards answering the question of why someone who was imprisoned on the island for five years would go back there and give tours reliving the experience day after day, to be part of the process of changing that.
Needless to say, we could all probably go on to describe this experience for quite some time, as evidenced by the fact that the above paragraph is huge and I haven’t even mentioned the bus tour that took us past the leper’s graveyard and the quarry where political prisoners were forced to turn limestone to gravel by hand day after day in the blazing sun, causing lasting lung and eye damage to all of them. Even we felt we hadn’t heard enough by the end of two hours, so I won’t even try. But Laura, aka Networking Queen, managed to get Modise’s contact information to meet for lunch the following week so that we’d have a chance to ask a few more questions and generally follow up on the experience. But I’ve got a whole weekend to describe here first, so more on that from Laura later.
Come to think of it, I really should pick up the pace because if I describe all the cool stuff we did in this kind of detail we’re going to be here all week! So, with a bit more brevity (feel free to post comments or send emails for further info ): that (Friday) night we started getting geared up to go out, but the double dose of Gravol I took in order to survive the boat trip home had left me totally brain-dead so I had to bow out of a visit to Ed’s eldest sister’s house…you’ll have to see picture descriptions or one of the other gal’s blogs for more on that, but I hear it was fun. Thankfully, I did manage to get it together just in time for our first night out in Cape Town at the now infamous Tiger Tiger. Ed’s friends were cool, and it did make for a cute picture and a really fun game of Disco (where you give each other activities to pantomime while disco-dancing). But the music was brutal (like, ACDC and the Beach Boys brutal) and by the end of the night, we resisted being dragged into a club full of teenagers only to return to Tiger Tiger where Laura ended up slapping the South African (lightweight, but still) cage-fighting champion full in the face! Apparently cage fighting makes you a little bit too comfortable with grabbing strangers. For some reason, it took Laura, Allison, a bartender and a manager to get him removed, but eventually he was gone. And so were we. Oh well, we met some cool “ou’s” (pronounced ‘ohs’, meaning dudes), had fun dancing, and there were many nights still to come…
Saturday saw a predictably bright and bushy start around noon to head off for a locally-guided tour of the Cape Peninsula by none other than our new best friend Ed and his friend Carlo. We managed to get the entire top half of the peninsula in before somebody mentioned cocktails and the party was relocated from the car to the Brass Bell, the gorgeous covered patio of which features in a few lovely, slantily-lit seaside shots. That evening was the finals of the Symphony of Fire featuring Spain, South Africa and…Canada! We pulled up a piece of embankment and had a great time watching the gorgeous display of some of the coolest fireworks I’ve ever seen. A little exhausted, we opted for movie rental that night (Mean Creek = lame), so we were nice and fresh the next morning for Laura to go surfing with Linzi before we resumed our peninsula tour. We had another delicious meal on the water, including huge veggie sandwiches and my first of the many plates of mussels I was to have on this trip, including some fresh, homebaked mussels handpicked by Marlene and Peter themselves that very night at our second fabulous hosted meal. We went and checked out a real live wild penguin colony at Boulder Beach, where for $4 you can actually go down to the water and swim alongside any penguins you happen to find. The water was frigid, but you bet I was in there (Laura had had enough that morning, Ed’s a local and Allison’s one of those ‘I hate cold water’ people. Phht! Come on! Penguins people, penguins!). Then that night we had a real good time at La Med, a sweet beach-front bar which is widely known as The place to go if you want to party but it unfortunately happens to be Sunday. For the second and not the last time the dancing went on until the wee hours of the morning, with good times being had by all.
Alrighty, Laura’s poised to take over for the next four days of our epic (thanks for the word, Jonno ) voyage. I will just conclude by saying out loud, in case it isn’t coming through loud and clear already, that this was definitely a highlight of our trip, due in no small part to the efforts of our hosts. Stay tuned for Part II of Cape Town Rocks!
Love,
Christina
posted by AXL in Africa at
12:06 PM
1 Comments:
Great post! I'd love to see more photos. Thanks for the long-awaited post you guys.
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