South Africa

Cape Town

Leaving Hyderabad Thursday night with quick stops in Mumbai and Johannesburg we arrived in Cape Town Friday morning. It was a long trip. In Johannesburg our trip from the international terminal to the domestic terminal involved a short walk outside and it was absolutely freezing. I was afraid hadn’t packed enough warm clothes, but we found the weather quite pleasant once we arrived in Cape Town. Sort of like the weather in San Francisco: warm enough but not too hot during the day, and very cold and foggy at night. The parallels between San Francisco and Cape Town definitely don’t stop at the weather though.

Cape Town is a coastal city situated on a bay, and though it has a lot more land to work with than San Francisco, it is similarly limited in its ability to grow by its geography. The first thing you notice about Cape Town is that some asshole put a mountain right in the middle of the city! Table Mountain rises up to over 3,000 feet with Cape Town spilling out in every direction as though someone had poured millions of homes over the top of the mountain and they just rolled down the sides, finally coming to rest as they spread out away from the hillsides. A few small wealthy neighborhoods manage to cling further up the slopes but the rocky steep angles prevent anyone from building very far up. A series of smaller peaks to the south called the Twelve Apostles and the solitary Lion’s Head to the north keep Table Mountain company.

Lion's Head peeking up from Cape Town.

There are three main languages spoken in South Africa: English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa. Xhosa is a mixture of the two main languages used by the tribes who were indigenous to the Cape. It involves different clicks and pops, and is really cool to hear when spoken. The “X” in the word “Xhosa” is actually one of the three different clicking sounds in the language so it is pronounced “*click*hosa”.

Afrikaans is also a hodgepodge language put together mostly with bits of Dutch, some indigenous languages, and Malaysian. It’s easy to think that Afrikaans is spoken by whites and Xhosa by blacks, but almost everyone in South Africa, black or white, speaks both English and Afrikaans as these are the two languages taught in school. Up until 1925 Afrikaans wasn’t recognized as a separate language, and was considered just a dialect of Dutch.

Jenni-Close
We were met at the Cape Town airport by Elisha (pronounced like ‘Elijah’), our butler. (More about that later). He had an SUV to help us with the luggage, and then we rented 2 cars to drive while we were there. Heather and I were rode back to the house with Elisha, Jenni drove the BMW, and Nick drove the Toyota. About ten minutes from the Mansion as we drove along the seaside street at a good clip I heard a smashing sound coming from somewhere outside the car. Although I couldn’t be sure where it came from, it seemed to have been behind us. It sounded as though someone had driven straight into a wall. Turning around and peering through the spaces between the suitcases I could only make out the passenger seat of the BMW. In it sat Brian holding his arms up and shaking his head in a sort of “why me?” gesture. We pulled the convoy over and as I got out and walked back towards the BMW I could see it was listing to one side. “Oh well” I thought. “A flat tire… We’ll just put on the spare and deal with the rental car company tomorrow.”

But when I got to the car I realized we were a bit worse off than I at first suspected. Jenni had somehow slammed not just one wheel, but the entire left side of the car into a protruding corner-curb. If this were at sea, it would have been the Exxon Valdese. Both left tires were blown and the wheels beneath them looked like they had been a chew toy for an enormous Doberman. This car was not driving anywhere. Most of us went on to the house, and Elisha went back with a couple people to wait for the people from Hertz. After everything was straightened out, Heather coined the phrase “Jenni-close.” A volleyball comes whizzing by your head and you’d say “That was close.” A plane flies into a mountainside, and you’d say “That was Jenni-close.” I’m sure it is not necessary for me to say that that phrase was used quite liberally throughout the week, and that it is less then likely Jenni will ever live the incident down. But no one was hurt, there were World Cup Finals to watch, and booze to be drank so everyone, including Jenni, soldiered on.

The Mansion
Our group was ten people and we stayed at an incredible place called The Hollywood Mansion in a small suburb of Cape Town called Camp’s Bay. They kept saying it was a suburb, but it was only like 5 minutes drive to the rest of Cape Town. Because it is their winter season the price was incredibly low and we ended up paying less than we would have at even a cheap hotel. It is a five bedroom mansion of modern design with a home theatre, a full bar, and a live in butler. There was a pool table, a swimming pool (though it was too cold to use), a workout room, two fireplaces, and a balcony off of practically every room. It was situated up a hillside and from every window in the front of the house you could see the ocean. The back of the house faced the Twelve Apostles and you could see them towering over the house from every window on that side. A creek ran by one side of the house, and if we were ever quiet enough we could hear it gurgling across the rocks. We all spent the first day just wandering around the house in awe. There were enough rooms that one morning we went to breakfast and left Nick behind because we couldn’t hear him watching a movie in the home theatre.

The house even had its own butler, Elisha, who I mentioned earlier. Elisha lived in a small cottage off the back of the house with his wife who was the housekeeper and their young son. He was from Zimbabwe and had moved to Cape Town three years ago for better job opportunities. Even though he wasn’t a local, he was very knowledgeable about the where and when and how of practically everything we wanted to do and it would have been a huge pain in the ass for us to do most things if he hadn’t been there. He wasn’t a butler in the traditional sense of the word. He didn’t wear a coat and tails and bring us breakfast in bed or shine our shoes or anything like that. He was mostly there to keep us from blowing ourselves up with the gas fireplaces and turn off the security alarm we kept setting off. Most mornings he would wander into the kitchen in a t-shirt and jeans or pajama bottoms, clutching a cup of coffee and just sort of stare out the window down towards the ocean, and not say much of anything. If he hadn’t told me he didn’t drink or do drugs I would have thought he had been hitting the bong first thing in the mornings. He’d give you a pleasant smile and a “Good morning” but mostly he seemed to be waiting for us to tell him what we needed and if there wasn’t anything, which was most mornings, he’d shuffle back out the kitchen door to his house after a few minutes.

There was an armed response to any alarm tripped in the neighborhood and our first morning there Jenni had to explain to two officers who we were and that the alarm was simply one of us opening the patio door. Each room had a panic button that summoned the security guards which made me feel safe until that morning with the patio door, when it took them about one hour to get to the house after we tripped the alarm.

Table Mountain
Our first full day there, a bunch of us hiked up one of the trails to the top of Table Mountain. According to the guide book it would take about three hours to reach the top, at which point we could take a funicular back down the other side.

I tried to make sure every time there was a camera aimed at me I shot the photographer the finger.

And pretty soon it was a trend.

The hike up was gorgeous. After the first half mile or so it was almost entirely straight up. There were steps carved into the trail and we scrambled up small boulders. At one point there was a section that involved ladders. After about two hours of climbing, when we were reaching what we though must be the top, we ran into a group of hikers who told us that it would be another three hours to the summit. Half the party wanted to go on and see if they could make it. But the rest of us, realizing that it was getting late and not wanting to get caught on the trail after dark, decided to head back down the way we’d come. The descent was a bitch. And it turns out that we were quite simply lied to about the time to the top. The ascending group made it to the top in about an hour, the same time it took us to get back down. So they got to ride the cable cars back down, but I didn’t feel too cheated. It was an incredible hike with expansive views of Cape Town revealing themselves through the trees seemingly every ten minutes.

Hooray! More fingers.

Aquila
About ninety minutes drive Northeast of Cape Town is a game reserve called Aquila. The name comes from the Latin word for “eagle”. We drove out there for a one-day safari where we were told we “might” see many different animals, but they couldn’t promise anything because the reserve was thousands of acres and the animals might be hiding out in a different part of the park when we drove out to look for them.

When we arrived, we were served breakfast in a huge lodge heated by fireplaces and smelling of burnt wood and stew. One of the women in our group is a vegetarian, and apparently this concept does not exist in South Africa. Every time we went to a restaurant they would look at her like her head had just spun around when she said “I’m a vegetarian.” When we were making the reservations for the safari the woman on the phone asked how many people would be eating in the lodge. We told her there would be ten of us, but one was a vegetarian. She said “Oh. So only nine of you will be enjoying the Tasty?” This blanket term used for meat used by the South Africans was our favorite colloquialism of the trip. We used it for every meal.

We got lucky and saw every animal on the list. From our open air truck we saw hippos, springbok, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra (Did you know a group of zebras is called a “dazzle”?), rhinoceros, ostrich, and lions. The driver was able to pull up to within 20 yards of most of the animals, and in some cases even closer. At one point we all got down from the truck and our guide walked us up into some rocks and pointed out a painting put on one of the boulders by Bushmen thousands of years ago. It was a painting of a group of stick figures each about 12 inches high. Our guide told us they used animal blood and water and mud to make the reddish ink the figures were painted with.

It was a fairly cold day, and from time to time a strong wind would chill us to the bone, but they had blankets in the truck, and we were too excited to really notice anyway. The landscape was wide open plains, not quite desert, with a lot of scrub-brush and the occasional boulder formation or small hill. It was eerily quiet when the driver would stop near an animal or group of animals and turn off the engine.

Our guide was named Matthew, and he was incredibly knowledgeable and very passionate about his job and about wildlife in general. He asked many questions about the U.S. and what types of animals we had there and all about their habits, and luckily Spaz was there because he seemed to be able to answer most of his questions. Matthew couldn’t have been more than 21 years old, had a thick Afrikaans accent, and was obviously of mixed heritage. He was what the South Africans would call “colored”. (Not black and not white).

When we got to the Lions, Matthew who had been riding on the running board of the truck climbed inside. He told us that the lions probably wouldn’t attack him if he were out there, but they were very curious, and being investigated by a pride of curious lions could be rather painful. They had their own section of the park cordoned off by electric fences, otherwise they’d eat all the other animals, and there wouldn’t be much left. Matthew said that occasionally some of the other animals would jump the fence and the lions got a free snack.

Within the larger enclosure was a smaller one containing three young males. They had to be kept separate from the rest of the pride until they were older because they were not the offspring of the dominant male and he’d kill them the first chance he got in order to keep them from usurping his throne. When the young ones were old enough to defend themselves, the plan was to let them in with the rest of the pride. As we approached this smaller enclosure we saw that the rest of the pride were all hanging around the fence to be close to the young ones, and when we came to a stop we were about 10 yards from the entire pride. It was impressive. None of them paid us much attention, and just lay around soaking up the sun but when a group of people rode nearby on horseback, all the lions stood up and didn’t take their eyes off of them until they had rounded the bend and gone out of sight.

The pride consisted of one male and three females. After we’d been sitting watching them for about 15 minutes, one of the females got a little frisky with the male and in playing, he was chasing her around when she suddenly took a turn toward the truck and started to gallop straight for us. Matthew, who had been quite relaxed until that point, suddenly stood up in his seat and without taking his eyes off of her, he started nudging the driver and saying “Go, go, go…” in the way someone does when they are trying to emphasize the urgency of a situation without seeming like they’re panicked. She didn’t give chase, and we drove on.

Every time we stopped Matthew would give his speech about one animal or another and then ask if any of us had any questions. No matter what the animal was, hippo to beetle, Tuyen asked the same question every time: “How does it taste?” She said it with zeal. The previous night she’d had a shish kabob of mixed game. There was kudu, crocodile, springbok, and ostrich. Apparently the tastes had agreed with her because now she was riding around this game preserve as though she were in the butcher’s section of a giant supermarket. We saw a herd of springbok grazing on a hillside, and Tuyen saw a pack of hamburgers.

Yup. We're all holding chunks of rhino poo.

After about a three hour drive through the park, we were back at the lodge for lunch. There was lots of the Tasty. But first we had a chance to go into the cheetah enclosure two at a time, and pet the two cheetahs. They had been hand raised so they were pretty comfortable around people. At sixteen months old, they are considered cubs, but they were not small. They still had a lot of their downy cub-fur though. They were really relaxed and just purred and purred as we pet them. Just before it was my turn to go in, the female got a little over stimulated and hissed at Heather as she pet her. She was quickly reprimanded, and went off to the far end of the enclosure to pout while Heather just moved over to pet the boy who seemed to love having twice the attention.

While I was petting the male cheetah he got a little frisky and decided to chew at my arm and paw at me (their claws don’t retract). What I was supposed to do, apparently, was to get my hand away from him and step back, but it didn’t hurt so I just grabbed his exposed belly and shook my hand around to egg him on. The rangers were quite nervous but I could tell he was just playing, and the cheetah and I had a great time.

Wine Country
The lands around Cape Town are covered in vineyards, and we took full advantage since the lands all around Hyderabad are covered in rocks. We booked a day long wine tour with drivers so none of us would have to stay sober. Two SUVs showed up in the morning to take us north. One driver was Stephen, and the other was named Monique. Monique was 20 years old, sort of jumpy, and had the voice of a 60 year old chain smoker. Stephen was in his 40s, had a thick Afrikaans accent, and seemed as though he’d been smoking weed all morning on his way to get us. He was hysterical.

At the first vineyard Stephen gave us a little tasting lesson, and then took us up onto the roof top patio to drink. There were great views and great wine. The second place, Van Ryn, made brandy, and this absolutely DE-fucking-LICIOUS cream liqueur called Angels’ Share. The name comes from a phrase used in brandy making: When brandy ages in its barrels, it loses about 3% of its volume. The distillers call this lost brandy “The Angels’ Share”. This stuff was a bit like Bailey’s, but instead of a cream-whiskey, it’s a cream-brandy so it’s a much more crisp taste. There was no pretense involved in brandy tasting. The guy who worked there said something along the lines of ‘Don’t swirl your glass. Don’t spit it out. It’s brandy. Just drink it. If you like it, it’s good, if you don’t like it, it’s bad.’ I liked the ten year old stuff, but not the twelve and not the new stuff.

There was a stop for a nice lunch at a vineyard called Skilpadvlei (tortoise valley) and there was more wine over lamb stew. Their wine was called Skilpad Dop. Skilpad means tortoise, and Dop means “shell” but is also a slang term for going out to have a drink. The label has a cartoon of a drunken turtle on it who’s wearing a wine glass on his head.

The next place, Simonsig, made sparkling wine and a guy came out and opened a bottle with a sword. It was an amazingly clean break or, at least, I didn’t get any glass in my champagne. They had the best wines we tasted. Everyone bought a bottle of one thing or another there. Heather and I bought two bottles of their Gewurztraminer. Good stuff.

The last place was on a huge farm with by far the best views of the day. It was called Seidelberg. The wine was good, but not spectacular. There were two big dogs loping around the lawn and they loved all the attention we brought with us and they seemed nice until one of the black workers would come near the shop. The dogs would chase the workers up to the edge of the lawn barking all the while. The manager told me she thought they were a “bit racist” but she didn't seem too concerned about it. I guess I wasn’t dark enough to stir them up, though because they had no problems with me, and one of them even came up to Heather and I and rolled onto his back and stayed there, belly up, for about ten minutes.

Stephen, Heather and I after a day of drinking.

It was getting dark as we left and we went to our final stop of the evening. It was an amazing restaurant called Moyo. It was in a huge circus-sized tent with a buffet on one side and a stage in the center. By this time it was getting very, very cold out so we were glad to see there were gas heaters set up over the tables, and thick wool blankets on the chairs. Heather wore both her and my blankets. Upon each party’s arrival a woman came to their table and painted each persons face with a design. There was plenty of the Tasty to go around, and the desserts were unbelievable. Every half an hour or so a group would take the stage. They performed drumming, dancing, and singing. One of the numbers was a bit too much like performance art for my taste, but the rest were great. At the end of the night, when we were getting ready to leave they approached our table and sang an acapella, sort of doo-wop song. They told us it was a South African welcoming song. The chorus was something like “take of your jacket and stay a while.” I usually detest any sort of performances during my meals. I’m not sure if it was the wine or the Tasty, but I made an exception in this case, and had a great time.

Robben Island
It means “Seal Island” in Dutch. This is where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years for his anti-apartheid views. The tours through the old prison are led by ex-inmates, which gives a more personal feeling to what could otherwise be a very quick and very sterile tour. The conditions suffered by the inmates were appalling, and the lengths to which the government would go to degrade them were amazing. For example, black inmates were not allowed shoes, and were forced to shave their heads the whole time they were there. Both of these actions were considered very subhuman by the areas black cultures at the time. Nor were they allowed jackets or long pants, and as we experienced, it gets very cold during the winters. There are a few famous pictures of Mandela at the prison wearing a jacket, pants, and shoes, but our tour guide explained that the prison officials knew every time someone was coming to take photos, and they simply supplied the clothes on that day in order to keep the Red Cross and other organizations off their back. Our tour guide had been imprisoned there when he was 19 or 20 and was there as an inmate for 15 years. He described the many infractions for which you would be tortured. In the communal cell blocks, there were up to eighty men sharing one shower, so it was hard for them to arrange time for everyone to shower, but if you failed to shower every day, you were beaten. Nelson Mandela and the other prisoners who were considered too dangerous to keep around others were kept in separate cells. In these cells they were provided with three blankets and a bucket. No bed, no fixtures, just three blankets and a bucket.

But Robben Island was not always a prison. It was a shipping depot, a leper colony, and a military base at various points in its history, and you get to hear all this history from a tour guide as you are driven around the island on a bus before you visit the prison buildings.

The next day we left, and we were very sad to do so. Cape Town was an amazing experience that I will never forget. I got to eat crocodile meat (no it doesn’t taste like chicken), I got to pet a cheetah, and everywhere I felt as though I were surrounded by an immense history, greater than I had the capacity to fully understand. And the whole time, I felt incredibly comfortable and welcome, as though I were just visiting a new neighborhood in my own home city. I will miss it and I hope to go back someday.

I think they've had enough.

This sign means "Check under your car for penguins before you drive away." I thought it was one of the funniest signs I've seen.