A City Tour and Robben Island

Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak dominates most of Cape Town.  No matter what part of this city I find myself in, the mountain seems to look down on me.  The picture below is is the view I get in the morning when Ed drives me out of their street to the Vineyard Hotel, where I am picked up for my city tour.  The university at the bottom of the hill is where my girlfriend Emma studied and where she met her now husband Harvey.  What a stunning location for a Uni! Our first stop is the District 6 museum.  This was once a lively mixed race area where people of all colours lived together.  During the apartheid area, this was one of the areas that were designated for whites only.  The blacks and coloured people were moved to Town Ships and their houses bull dozed and street names changed.  The District 6 museum tells the story of what happened here and and is intended to be a place of healing for the former residents.

Today, people who are able to prove past ownership of property in this area, are able to  reclaim their land.  People are trickling in although many have opted to move on to other suburbs.  Our next stop is the South African museum.  We walk through the company gardens (another botanical garden) where the Houses of Parliament are to be found. The South African museum is the oldest museum in South African and houses some interesting exhibits of San Rock art and fossilized human footprints.  The tour stops at the Malay Quarter where we are able to walk the streets with brightly coloured houses.  If you wish to live here you must also be prepared to put up with the regular call to prayer from the mosque around the street corner!

Unfortunately we are not able to go up Table Mountain as the cable car has been stopped for 2 weeks for maintenance.  We are taken up signal hill instead for another brilliant view of this city including the new stadium built in Cape Town for the World Cup. Our last stop is a tour of a diamond factory where we are shown how the precious and semi precious stones are set in beautiful trinkets!  I come away with my bank balance intact.

I take Christina and Ed out for dinner in the evening.   We try the local Indian and find it to be very yummy and quite authentic.

I spend my last day in Cape Town on a tour to Robben Island.  This is of course the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years.  We take the ferry over and I make friends with a young uni student from England spending a semester abroad.   She too has fallen in love with this city and is wondering if there is a way for her to come back and spend more time here. 

Our guide to Robben Island is a former prisoner.  He leads us to their dining hall and starts to share his story.   He had joined the fight for freedom after witnessing the murder of his girlfriend, who was shot in the mouth.  He tells us how he trained overseas and came back to South Africa to join the fight.  He was arrested after his bazooka misfired and shared part of his time here with Mandela.

We are shown the cell where Mandela was imprisoned and we all line up for the obligatory photos.  The spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness which he preached seems to be the attitude of the former prisoners here as well.

The former inmates now work together with people who were former jailors here.  He explains to us they are all friends now and wish to leave the past behind and move on to a united future.  It is a very special trip down memory lane and I am happy that my visit to Cape Town has included Robben Island.

Friday night is my last evening here.  Christina has invited most of Emma’s extended family to dinner so that we can all meet.  I have an enjoyable evening exchanging stories about their sister/my girl friend (Hi Em!!) and sharing stories about my travels so far and my plans for the rest of the year!  I will leave Cape Town and South Africa in the morning and head to Namibia for a close encounter with the Big Cats.  I have had an amazing week here in Cape Town and a big thank you to Christina and Ed for their very kind hospitality.  I look forward to meeting them again in Sydney next year.  I am also excited and ready for my next adventure. 

 People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.  ~Thomas Szasz,