Photograph by Job Thomas
About a week into Cape Town, a few of us decided to go to Agulhas National Park. As national parks go, Agulhas does not have much to brag about. Apparently, it is the smallest national park in South Africa. That was a little refreshing. Everything else claimed to be the largest whatever it was on the continent. Agulhas has no need to overcompensate for how tiny it is. There are two reasons to go, which happened to be the two reasons we wanted to go.
Cape Agulhas is as far south as you can possibly go in Africa. It is also where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans crash into each other. I doubt I will ever go to the southern tips of Argentina or Chile. Unless I go to Melbourne or New Zealand someday, this is about as south as I am ever going to get.
Since Agulhas National Park was not on any scheduled guided tour, we had to find our own way. Since it was over 200 kilometers from our house, taking a taxi was not an option. Something we found incredibly easy to do in South Africa was rent a car. Or hire a car in the local lingo. In some parts of the world, renting a car can be difficult when you have a foreign driver's license. I have had an international permit for years, but using it is always hit and miss. Since my Taiwan license is entirely in Chinese and my Hong Kong license has a lot of Chinese on it, people in English speaking countries get confused. Oddly enough, it never bothers anyone in Israel, a country whose language looks absolutely nothing like English or Chinese.
In South Africa, a country that speaks English and a dozen other languages, no one cared about all the Chinese. Their big rule was that only one person could drive the car, unless we paid for additional drivers. That turned out to be unnecessary since all of the lower priced rental cars had manual transmissions and I was the only one in our little group who could drive a stick. And as terrible as it sounds to say, everyone else was Taiwanese. They had no business driving in a country that obeys basic traffic laws and common sense. Most stereotypes are beyond ignorant, but Chinese drivers truly are horrible. The biggest reasons for that, in my professional opinion, are that no one has to learn how to drive before taking the driving test and none of the existing traffic laws are enforced. Why learn how to drive properly when no one cares whether you do or not. There are no police patrolling the streets of China/Taiwan, so you will never be pulled over. As long as you stop at the red lights that have cameras and only seldom crash into anyone, you can drive as incompetently as you want.
I learned how to drive in Minnesota. I realize how American that makes me sound, but we had to demonstrate an ability to operate the vehicle in traffic in order to get a license. And we had police cars all over the place, any of which could pull you over at any time for a million different reasons. Unlike Taiwan, you can actually lose your license, or even your car, by being a bad driver in the United States. There is ample incentive to do better.
In Cape Town, we rented a shiny blue 2022 Volkswagen Polo 5 speed. Back before I owned a car, I used to love renting cars. It was an opportunity to drive, usually in an unfamiliar place. Now that I have my own car and drive to work every day, some of that magic is gone. There is nothing wrong with the Volkswagen Polo, but my car at home is better in every measurable way. The only thing I would change about my car if I could is that it is not fully manual. The rental car was. So even though it was a much weaker car, it was fun to drive.
The drive from Cape Town to Cape Agulhas was scenic, once we got out of the city. Cape Town is a beautiful city surrounded by nature, but unless you are looking directly toward one mountain or another, the view from most freeways is grass or suburbs. Beyond the city limits, we went up into the Hottentots Holland Mountains. They actually named them that. It was mostly winding hill roads going up and down with a few small towns here and there. Just before the cape, there was an endless stretch on a flat road that went in a straight line. We went from a scenic mountain drive to Interstate 5 in Central California. I almost fell asleep. When the road followed the coast, we drove between the shore and some comfortable looking houses. There was a nice mix of new and overpriced to older beach cottages. They all had great views of the ocean.
The last residential area before the cape was the little laid back beach town of L'Agulhas. Rather than overcharge tourists for the food, every shop owner seemed genuinely friendly. The cashier at the local grocery store told me that they rarely got any foreigners. Given its distance from Cape Town, I could see why. That also explained why so many locals were curious about where we came from. Taiwanese are not the most demonstrative people in the world, and my friends were uncomfortable at first with total strangers coming up to us and asking questions, until they saw how relaxed I was. Since they knew I was from a place with infinitely more crime and chaos than anything they could imagine, they generally looked to me when trying to decide if any given situation was dangerous or not. That was a lot of responsibility, especially when I had never been to South Africa. The country was just as foreign to me as it was to everyone else. Even worse, my last real boyfriend was from South Africa. That gave my colleagues even more reason to assume I knew anything about the place. He told me stories of his homeland, of course, but I was as much out of water as he would be in the United States.
I felt at home in L'Agulhas. It is a tiny village of only a few hundred people. I could never imagine living somewhere so small, yet like Courseulles-sur-Mer, Normandy and Lisse, South Holland, there was something about it that felt innately comfortable. It also would have been an exceptional place to ride a bicycle, called a boney for some reason. Coincidentally, I rented a Volkswagen Polo in Normandy, though a much earlier model. Other than the name, I would never know they were the same car. I could not have planned that even if I wanted to. When we made the reservation, we booked a Toyota Yaris “or similar”.
Almost the entire route from Cape Town to Cape Agulhas was well maintained highways and roads. Until we hit the Cape Agulhas Lighthouse. The lighthouse itself was pretty small and not much more than a pit stop right around the corner from our final destination. Beyond the lighthouse was a dirt road leading to a small dirt parking lot. There was also a wooden walking path from the lighthouse to the ocean. I was expecting some kind of monument, and was delighted to see that they left everything natural. Other than the wood boards and a small sign pointing out that the Indian Ocean was on the left and the Atlantic Ocean on the right, the area probably looked the same as it did a few hundred years ago. There were some serious waves while we were there, but no one went to surf. The shore is several miles of jagged rocks. Even swimming would be suicidal. The only real reason to go to Cape Agulhas is to say that you went to the southern tip of Africa.
One of the first things I noticed about driving in South Africa was how polite the other drivers were. In China and Taiwan, it is kill or be killed. Everyone wants to be first, all the time. There are no stop signs because there is no right of way, so we all get to spend more time at stoplights. There are no passing lanes because everyone has to be first, all the time. In South Africa, drivers actually changed lanes so I could pass them. Not only did they not try to block me, they actively moved out of my way. At one point, a big rig truck moved into the next lane so I could pass. We were going uphill. Changing lanes must have slowed him down, but he made the effort for no other reason than for my convenience. And maybe the law. I was blown away. That would never happen in Taiwan. You either find your own way around the truck or stay behind it until it gets off the freeway. The first few times I let someone pass me, I wondered why their emergency lights were blinking. Something I have never encountered anywhere else in the world was drivers thanking each other for pulling over by turning on their emergency lights. That seems like a pleasant little habit we could easily make universal.
Most of the driving rules in South Africa were pretty straightforward. All of the road signs were in English, which was convenient. My Taiwanese friends found it disorienting, or disorientating, that traffic flowed on the left. Since I have been driving in Hong Kong for almost 12 years, it felt normal to me. My car at home is right hand drive, even though Taiwan is traffic right. If I can get used to that, driving a car with the steering wheel on the correct side relative to traffic is easy. I still prefer to shift with my right hand, but I will take what I can get.
Filling the car with gas was almost the same as Taiwan. The people who work at the station do it for you. Except in South Africa they also wash your windshield and check your tires, or tyres. It was almost like full service in the United States, without any self service option. I can't remember the last time I actually pumped my own gas. It might have been in Spain.
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No hate, please. There's enough of that in the world already.