Then Maryanne suggested to her friend Tracey that she may like to join us and she promptly organized the tickets to see The Nutcracker. Okay, maybe it didn’t exactly happen in that order. Tracey met us at the V&A waterfront (Victoria and Albert, Cape Town’s version of Pier 39 in San Francisco. No, wait, it’s the other way around. V&A is more than twice as old as Pier 39). Tracey had a friend to join us for the evening, Mariana, another person who worked at the same company and at the same time as Maryanne and Tracey, although they were in very different departments.
We all met up for meal at the V&A waterfront where Tracey had reserved us at a South African restaurant. It was very tasty. Mine was topped off with koeksisters that are made a whole order of magnitude better than the already delectable corner store variety.
We had a quick buzz around the V&A waterfront and met with Tracey and Mariana for a lovely meal before a trip to see the Nutcracker (a classic Christmas time ballet)
The ballet was very good. I must admit that I was a little slow to suspend my disbelief and really get into it. The first act, with the overly foppish family who only communicates in dance and sweeping arm gestures, rather than words, was a little hard for me to get into. The rest of the crowd seemed to love it, though, with its ballet dancing toddlers in little outfits.
Once the story moved on and the adults started dancing, it really was pretty hard not to be impressed at what was clearly each dancer’s lifelong dedication to their art. The sets and costumes were also amazing. It was definitely a world-class performance. It does seem a bit surreal to me that we keep living a life where it is perfectly normal to untie from our guano-covered fishing hulk neighbor so that we can sail to Cape Town and be sitting at the ballet with people in evening wear. I’m sure it won’t be long before we find ourselves back to doing something or other that seems decidedly un-fancy.
Before we went back to shorts and t-shirts again, Tracey met us for Christmas dinner at the Royal Cape Yacht Club.
An early Christmas dinner at the fancy Royal Cape Yacht Club (RCYC)
We had expected it to be more of an event, like the mass dinner service you get at some weddings. Instead, the Yacht Club seemed to be operating like it was any other Sunday. (They are closed on Christmas Day, Tracey was told they were doing the dinner the week before when she booked it.) The three of us had the Christmas set menu, which was delicious and very Christmassy, even ending with puddings and mince pie. All the other tables around us seemed to be filled with regulars having fish & chips or burgers. We seemed to be the only ones that got the memo.
That was a bit weird, but at least we got to go into Cape Town and see Tracey again. Afterward, she drove us to Kirstenbosch, where they were having an outdoor concert of Christmas carolling.
Kirstenbosch is a giant botanic garden, so we arrived early so we could have time wandering the gardens beforehand. They are beautiful. I particularly enjoyed the fynbos, which is roughly equivalent to tundra. Just this area of South Africa has more beautiful endemic plant varieties, and by a large margin, than the rest of the world’s tundra zones combined.
We had a quick tour of the Kirstenbosch grounds before settling in for the Christmas carol concert
As the start of the concert approached, we returned to the car to get the picnic supplies that Tracey had kindly brought along. By then, people were streaming in from all the different entrances towards us as we were leaving.
Maryanne and I had originally thought there may be a few hundred in attendance, like when we went to the outdoor concert at Helderberg. Instead, rain checks from a couple of the drizzly days earlier in the week had the lawn packed with wall-to-wall picnic blankets. At the end, the emcee told us the final count was 5,002 attendees.
The concert was a bit not what we had expected. It began not so much with traditional carolling as with holiday music in general, as if we were in the atrium of a big mall with a live brass band. From there, it spent the next three hours morphing gradually into a full-on church service, complete with bible verses and group prayers led by a minister. They got to the big finale of back-to-back singalongs of ‘Silent Night’ just before I was expecting Joel Osteen to bound out on stage.
Our next bit of tourism was a visit with Tracey to Robben Island, the former prison most well-known for being the place where Former President Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in captivity. Since the end of Apartheid, two of the other political prisoners have also risen to the Presidency, Kglema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma.
Kyle and I spent some more time at the V&A waterfront and the Two Oceans Aquarium before Tracey could join us for lunch at one of the many great restaurants to chose from
Robben Island was a somber and somehow inspring tour at the same time (and unexpectedly included penguins)
After an orientation tour where we were shown around various parts of the island; the Mosque, the cemetery, the guard’s accommodation, and the quarry where hard labor was carried out. We were then turned over to a second guide. He took us to D Block, where Namibian prisoners were kept (Namibia won independence from Apartheid South Africa in 1990). There, in the big room where as many as eighty prisoners at a time were housed, he explained that every section of the prison was kept strictly isolated from the others. Kitchen staff were the only group allowed between sections. Each political group within the prison did whatever they could do to get their most trusted people on kitchen duty so that plans could be coordinated between sections.
He then explained that he had been a prisoner himself in this very room for six the years before the last of the political prisoners were pardoned and released in 1995. He told us what they had charged him with to justify sending him to Robben Island. The list came too long and fast to remember, but I do recall hearing Sabotage, Inciting Violence and Possession of Explosives among them.
He painted a picture of what it had been like for him to live here and of all of the tiny victories he and his compatriots won along the way, like the time they were finally given a partial supply of plywood bunks so that some of them would no longer have to sleep on the floor.
Then came the time for him to answer questions. Out of either politeness or deference, most of the questions started as relative softballs. After a while, more direct queries started coming, mostly from children; “Did they hurt you? Do you have nightmares?”
”Yes, they did. Yes, I do, but not so often anymore?”
We could see in his eyes that he was reliving some painful memories. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to have so many difficult conversations all day, every day and in the place where it all happened. Our guide explained that, to him, the job has saved him. Being able to come and go as a free man under the gaze of not guards, but people who want to learn from him about what happened makes it worth it.
”Being able to talk about it is the best therapy I can have. Otherwise, I think it would haunt me”
We were then shown to the wing where Nelson Mandela was kept. In the yard was the vine under which Mandela secreted the manuscript for his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom” We then all filed into the cell block corridor to see Mandela’s former cell. It was very sparse, with only a bucket, a small stool, and a mat no thicker than a finger laid on the floor as a bed, with a couple of blankets as a pillow.
When the tour was finished, our guide then thanked us,
us, the tourists, for everything. He explained that it was only because of the unrelenting pressure of the international community, with worldwide protests demanding the end of Apartheid, that the government finally gave in and opened Robben Island’s cell doors once and for all.
It seemed like more credit than I was personally due. I did go to a couple of big protests and boycotted a few companies until they divested from South Africa, but that pales to losing your very freedom for years while many of those around you aren’t even surviving their sentences.
It was a very emotionally difficult, but moving visit. Having Tracey there with us made it even more so. Her first-hand accounts of living in South Africa both before and after the fall of Apartheid gave us a lot more context than we otherwise would have had.
The following day, the weather was forecast to be the finest of our Cape Town visit so far, with few clouds and no wind. The first thought we had was to go to the top of Table Mountain.
Everybody else in town also apparently had the same idea. By the time Tracey met us at the gondola station at opening time, the line to get on it was way around the corner. Since the gondola doesn’t run on windy days and since nobody wants to go to the top when the mountain is covered in cloud, there was a three or four-day backlog. Even the employees there told us the line only gets this long once or twice a year.
We did get to meet some lovely people during our three-hour wait to get our turn in a gondola. They even had a roving emcee working the crowd providing entertainment. When he got to Maryanne and me, we had a moment of nano-fame when we couldn’t provide a quick answer to the “Where are you from?” question. That caused him to back up and linger disproportionately as he interviewed us.
We took the cable car up to the top of Table mountain and spent several hours up there enjoing the trails, flowers, wildlife and a lunch with a view to end the exploration!
I must say, once we finally made it to the top, I instantly decided the trip was totally worth the wait. The view from the top of Table Mountain is one of the world’s iconic best for a reason. Since we had taken so long to get here, we made a point of walking the longest of the mesa-top loops that are available. The views from the sides that don’t face Cape Town are also just as good.
I had expected impressive scenery looking out from the clifftops, but was less prepared for the view the other direction. There were SO many beautiful varieties of fynbos everywhere. It is wonderful stuff because, like most tundras, it looks like a bunch of olive-green bushes from a distance. Look closer, though, and you are rewarded with a kaleidoscope of delicate flowers of all shapes and colors. As I’ve said before, South Africa generally, but especially Table Mountain, has more species of fynbos than all North American and European tundras combined. In fact, it’s around ten times as many. I’m sure that several botanists must have received their PhDs on work done on Table Mountain alone. It’s fascinating.
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