Cape Town, South Africa
The flight from Durban to Cape Town took a little over two hours and was the opposite of eventful. As with Durban, we were all driven by car to different apartments/houses. The biggest difference was the size.
King Shaka International Airport is in the suburbs of Durban, outside of the city limits, but no more than a half hour drive from downtown. Cape Town International Airport is smack dab in the middle of the city, but it took us over an hour to get to our house. Not only is Cape Town ten times larger than Durban, but our house was in Simon's Town, about as far south as you can go on the Cape Peninsula without hitting protected wilderness. Getting to the house from the airport required three different freeways. When we finally got off the freeway, we were on a long street along the coast. The street got noticeably smaller as we passed through downtown Simon's Town. With most of the city behind us, we turned onto a smaller road that went gradually uphill and then dramatically uphill. We turned onto a tiny lane that looked more suitable for Taiwanese scooters than South African pickup trucks. From scooter lane, we turned onto a slightly wider road that went even further uphill. An hour and twenty minutes after we left the airport, we turned onto a dead end alley. Had this happened in the middle of the night, and had our driver been even close to menacing, this could have been a spooky ride. But we left the airport at ten in the morning, the drive along the coast was cheery, and our driver could not have been friendlier.
From the alley, it looked like we would all be staying in a tiny cottage not nearly large enough for seven people. The house was on a slope, so we had to go indoors before we fully understood its size. The top floor was a two car garage that could only fit small cars. The garage interior was large enough for an American SUV, but the separate garage doors were barely wide enough to fit a Volkswagen. Half a floor down was the tiniest front yard, the front door, a half bathroom, and what could only be described as the mudroom. They probably call it something else in South Africa. The next floor down was somehow four times larger than the floor above. What we came to call the second floor had a large living room, an enormous kitchen, a decent sized dining room, and a full bathroom. There was also a balcony across the entire rear of the house. The bottom floor had three bedrooms and four full bathrooms. The large backyard could be reached by a sliding glass door from each of the bedrooms. Beyond the backyard was a plot of empty land not quite large enough to build another house. Without the fence between the yard and empty land, we would have assumed the entire thing was the backyard. From the street, the back of the house looked like it should have been the front, except there was no front door and the address was posted on the alley side. All of the houses on the street were similar, with inviting backyards on the larger street and small entrances on the alley.
The bedrooms were nothing like what I expected. Instead of a master bedroom, the largest looked like a dorm room. It had four bunk beds, enough for eight people. We only had seven staying at the house, so the four youngest shared that room. At first, we thought the house only had four and a half bathrooms. Then someone opened one of the closets in the largest bedroom and discovered the door to another bathroom. It was an odd design. From the room, it looked like a wall of closets. If you opened the doors on the left and right, you got closet. If you opened the middle door, there was a tiny hallway that led to a full sized bathroom behind all the closets.
The medium sized room looked like any other bedroom with its own bathroom. Two of our more senior dancers shared that one. As the highest ranking person in the house, I took the single room. It was pretty small, but it had its own bathroom. I never really cared about the size of the room since most of the time I spent in the house was either in the kitchen or on that large balcony.
I liked the Durban kitchen better. It was smaller and felt more like a home. The Cape Town kitchen was large and had every appliance we could ever need, except a rice cooker. The kitchen was fully loaded with a stainless steel refrigerator, oven, stove, dishwasher, toaster oven, toaster, microwave, blenders, mixers, pots and pans, dishes and utensils. But it was all western style. There was not a single chopstick in the house and we all missed not having a rice cooker. The Cape Town kitchen was larger, fancier, and obviously more expensive. It felt like it was designed for entertaining guests. I liked the Durban kitchen better because it was designed for making a quiet dinner at home.
The balcony was the best feature of the house. The view from the front yard was the house across the alley. The view from the backyard was the house across the street. Since all the houses were on a slope, they all had a balcony facing northeast. We had an unobstructed view of the northern tip of False Bay. The sunsets were nice, but the sun went down the other side of the Cape Peninsula. Sunrises were spectacular. Since I generally wake up before the dawn, I watched the sun come up over the mountains that surround Cape Town and reflect off the water in the bay almost every morning. Most of my roommates missed it.
I also saw a whale one day. I was standing on the balcony minding my own business when a whale just popped out of the water. It was too far away for me to even guess what kind of whale it was, but it was definitely a whale. There were more than a few dolphins in False Bay, but any movement from them just looked like waves at that distance. This was clearly a whale jumping halfway out of the water and crashing onto its back. My roommates spent a lot of time looking for their own whales, but none of us ever saw another one. At least not from that balcony.
Transportation in Cape Town was similar to Durban in that we were all picked up and driven to work. That was convenient, especially since we worked more in Cape Town than anywhere else. In other cities, we introduced a few traditional Chinese dance styles to the locals, everyone mostly got a kick out of it, and we moved on. In Cape Town, we learned a traditional African dance, a variation of the Makhibo. That required extra work on our part. Every other show was full of routines everyone knew backward and forward. The Makhibo was brand new to all of us.
Fortunately, we had some free time in between all the rehearsing, though finding our own transportation was more complicated. Since Durban is ten times smaller than Cape Town, it was much easier to get around. I could walk to the beach in less than half an hour, and walk the entire promenade in less than an hour. Cape Town was a harder city to walk around. Boulders Beach was only a few hundred meters away, but with all the winding hill roads, it took a good ten minutes. Downtown Cape Town was more than 40 kilometers from the house. I have no idea how long that would have taken to walk. When we arrived, it looked like staying in Simon's Town was going to be inconvenient.
Local transportation in Cape Town is not exactly admired the world over. The bus lines were convoluted and never really went where we wanted to go. The Metrorail's Simonstown Line went from the main station to Simon's Town. People rave about the view from the train, but that is only during the 20 minute stretch along False Bay. The rest of the ride is an hour in the suburbs. Since Cape Town was designed for cars, taxis were our primary ride off the clock.
And we had plenty of places to go. Cape Town has pretty much everything you need in a single city. You can climb a mountain, swim in the ocean, ogle birds, keep at least one eye on baboons, and run away from an ostrich all in one day. As long as you have transportation.
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