Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden
As with the Durban Botanic Gardens, there were birds all over the place. Unlike failing to identify flowers, I could tell the difference between the geese and owls. Just before sunset, something called an African dusky flycatcher goes to town on any insects flying around their territory. If they eat mosquitoes, we should import these guys to Taiwan. Cape Town is probably a better place to live if you are a bird. The city is surrounded by nature, and if you get hungry, there are plenty of people eating in trendy outdoor cafés. Kirstenbosch is proud to be a haven for butterflies, though the Durban Botanic Gardens had far more.
Something we saw in Kirstenbosch that I do not remember ever seeing in Durban were tiny tortoises. These were not the jumbo 100-year-old tortoises that really hate it when you put your children on them for your Facebook pictures. They were cat sized grass assassins. People must find them cute and/or delicious because there were also signs reminding everyone that taking a tortoise home is highly illegal.
Something Kirstenbosch had that I have never seen at any other botanic garden was the tree canopy walkway through a 130 meter stretch of the arboretum. What made it unique was that the walkway got as high as 12 meters in some places. Rather than walk along the trees at ground level, we walked through the trees at monkey level, sometimes standing above a few tree tops. The idea was to give us a unique point of view. It clearly worked. I have walked around a million trees in my life. This was the first time I walked in the trees.
One of the most obvious differences between the Durban Botanic Gardens and Kirstenbosch are the locations. The Durban gardens are downtown, surrounded by city. Kirstenbosch is in Table Mountain National Park, near the bottom of the mountain. Being inside a national park makes for a far more natural environment. Since Kirstenbosch is inside the borders of a national park, you can hike from the gardens into the mountains all day. More than a few of the most popular trails up Table Mountain start at the botanical garden.
Castle of Good Hope
The Castle of Good Hope is a 17th century Dutch fort about as downtown as you can get. It is right next to Cape Town City Hall. The history of the fort is interesting even if the building is not much to look at. I could have missed this one and it would not have detracted from my time in Cape Town in any way whatsoever, though I certainly do not regret going.
District Six Museum
Next to the Castle of Good Hope is the District Six Museum, an old church turned museum. It honors the history of District Six, a multiracial community of artists who were evicted by the government after someone realized the potential for profit so close to the bay and decided it should be a white neighborhood. More than 20,000 residents were forced out of their homes and taken to various townships. Every building that was not a church was bulldozed. Thanks to grassroots protests, the area was never developed. After apartheid died, District Six started to build up again, with a few of the evicted residents returning.
Iziko South African National Gallery / South African Jewish Museum / Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre
The Iziko South African National Gallery, next to the District Six Museum, is a small fine arts museum. I did not recognize the name of a single artist in the collection, even though it had 17th century Dutch and 19th century British art. The Dutch Golden Age has some of my favorite artists, especially Rembrandt. None of them were at the South African National Gallery. Most of the museum is modern art by contemporary South African artists. It is right next to the South African Jewish Museum, which I went to on my own later. Next door is the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre, an odd mashup of the holocaust and apartheid. The worst part about combining the two is that right after the holocaust when everyone said we should never forget and never let anything like that happen again, the first apartheid laws were passed. While it was nice to see a European genocide from an African point of view, there was no way the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre was ever going to compete with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I suppose we are not supposed to rate holocaust museums against each other, but Yad Vashem is a truly world class memorial and museum. It is easily one of the best museums I have ever seen anywhere in the world.
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Just a few feet from the water at Table Bay Harbour is the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. It is even more modern than the South African National Gallery, and is the “largest museum in Africa”. The building is only a few years old and looks like old science fiction's idea of the future when the colonies on the Moon are under attack in the distant year 2000. The South African National Gallery reminded me of the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. MOCAA, as the kids call it, seems like an incredibly well curated museum. But I have to admit that modern art goes right over my head. I can generally get what the artist is trying to say, until I see a bunch of cinder blocks hanging from the ceiling. I have no doubt that it represents something about society and our ills, but it looks like bricks hanging from the ceiling to me.
Victoria & Alfred Waterfront
The only other group shopping I did in Cape Town was to the Canal Walk Shopping Centre in Century City because it is next to China Town and built on a canal. Both were disappointing. The mall is supposed to look Venetian, but it looks like something in Las Vegas. It is more upscale, so my colleagues liked it, but it was just another mall to me. The tiny Venetian canal looked neither Italian nor Californian and it led to a bit of a swamp, which was surprising to see in an area that is obviously a high priced residential and retail development. China Town was a smaller shopping mall and had absolutely nothing to do with anything even resembling a Chinatown. Everyone was disappointed in that one, especially since it was low end, dollar store shopping.
Robben Island
A quick ferry ride from the V&A Waterfront gets you to Robben Island, a small chunk of flat land in Table Bay. No one goes for the beaches. The main compound on the island is now a museum and was a prison for 300 years. The most famous prisoner, by far, was Nelson Mandela, who spent 18 years in a surprisingly large cell. His cell had a window, but the view is of a solid gray wall and the gray prison yard. There was no green anywhere in sight. While the island itself is mostly green and brown, the prison yard is concrete and stone. What I liked about the prison/museum tour was that it was conducted by a former inmate. Since it only closed in 1996, there are still plenty of people alive who experienced in firsthand. They can tell their stories much better than a park ranger at Alcatraz.
Something I will remember until the day I die was listening to a Shoah survivor tell her story at Yad Vashem. Her generation is mostly gone. Soon there will be no one to tell us what they witnessed. There is no point in human history without crimes against humanity. We will always treat the people we categorize as different from us like animals. After enough time has passed, we read about all the atrocities in history books and watch documentaries. We are spoiled for choice when it comes to man's inhumanity to man. But listening to someone who was actually there speak about their personal experience is infinitely more powerful than reading a historian's thesis. Yad Vashem will be a moving place even after all the survivors are gone. I only hope Robben Island will not lose some of its power when there are no longer any former inmates to speak to visitors.
Rhodes Memorial
Still, it is a good looking little stone building at the bottom of Devil's Peak, right next to the University of Cape Town. Monuments to horrible people can be nice places to visit. Chiang Kai Shek was a murderous dictator who got rich making his people poor, but the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall is one of the best pieces of architecture in all of Taiwan.
Stellenbosch
The Cape Winelands region is South Africa's wine capital. Like California's Napa Valley, France's Val de Loire, and Israel's Galil, it is not the only area with vineyards, but it is where most of the award winning wine comes from. We went to Stellenbosch, the largest town in the region surrounded by 150 vineyards. Just outside of Cape Town, Stellenbosch was a quick drive from the City Centre, though it was twice as far away for those of us in Simon's Town. Coincidentally, Simon's Town and Stellenbosch were both named after the same person, Simon van der Stel.
Though practically the same place geographically, Stellenbosch felt different. Cape Town is a large international city with a healthy mix of pretty much every language and ethnic group South Africa has to offer. Stellenbosch is a small town of mostly white people who all speak Afrikaans. As with the rest of South Africa, almost everyone understands English, but the accents were stronger in Stellenbosch. Or at least seemed stronger since they were all mostly the same.
A guided tour through a vineyard would be fascinating for anyone interested in how wine is made. Some in our group loved wine. Some liked it from time to time. Most were indifferent. I used to drink the occasional glass on holidays and during special events. Since I lost my sense of smell, I have had maybe four of five glasses.
Having said all that, the price of wine in Stellenbosch is dirt cheap. We went to a few tastings, none of which did me any good, but everyone else said that every vineyard had some pretty good wine. The Cape Winelands are known for world class wine, and every vineyard told us they had some of the best wine in the world. Little did they know that they were dealing with customers from Taiwan, where every single merchant claims to have the best merchandise. Boasts go in one ear and out the other. Even so, almost everyone in our group bought a bottle or two. It would have been rude not to, and the price was too low to ignore. Wine does nothing for me these days, but I know people back home who might like it, so I bought a few bottles myself.
Table Mountain National Park
Our first stop was the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of the peninsula. Part of the Table Mountain National Park, anyone can go there on their own. With a guide, we walked down trails I would have thought were closed or too dangerous for visitors, and got a crash course in the local flora and fauna. There were flowers and plants on the peninsula that could not be found anywhere else in the world. The people of Cape Town are especially proud of their peninsula sandstone fynbos, which all looked like desert plants to me, even though Cape Town is nowhere near a desert. There were small reptiles and mammals that can be found everywhere, as well as the dassie, a cat sized varmint that looks like a Disney cartoon character. The biggest surprise to our guide was when we ran into a sea otter. Though they burrow and sleep on land, they spend most of their time in the water. Our guide speculated that the one we saw might have been sick since it was out in the open and making no effort to hide from us.
What did not surprise our guide at all were the ostriches. They walked around like they owned the place. They are not afraid of humans, and we were warned not to get too close. Their bark is worse than their bite, which is more like a gentle peck, but they can kick you into next week if threatened. They have serious claws that could easily ruin anyone's day. Fortunately, an ostrich is more likely to run away than attack. And they can run circles around whoever holds any Olympic records.
What surprised no one were the baboons. We were told about their behavior before we left Taiwan, so some of my colleagues were terrified of them. Others suggested no one show any fear. I have no idea if a baboon can sense fear in humans, but I know they are not even the tiniest bit afraid of us. There are only a few hundred baboons on the peninsula, even though it seems like they are everywhere. They even greet visitors at the parking lot. The biggest rule, obviously, is to never give them any food under any circumstances. They are selfish creatures and if you give them a crumb, they will take the entire cake. Not that anyone needs to volunteer food. If you have food on you, they will find it and leave you with nothing. The largest monkeys in the world, they can easily kill a human. For some reason, they almost never do. Humans are far more likely to kill them. Baboons are protected in the Table Mountain National Park, but when they roam into nearby villages, they tend to get shot by people who have a problem with anything breaking into their homes for food.
Ironically, there would be fewer baboons digging through trash if humans had not already killed off all of their predators. The Cape Peninsula used to house lions, leopards, and hyenas before men hunted them out. There were also elephants and rhinoceros, which were not a threat to baboons, but hard to image walking around the cape. Elephants need wide open areas to roam. I cannot picture them on the rocky trails or climbing the mountains.
Our second destination on the Cape Peninsula was the most famous, and arguably the most famous landmark in all of South Africa. Table Mountain takes up only a tiny fraction of Table Mountain National Park, yet it dominates Cape Town's skyline. Not only is it the highest point in the city, its flat surface makes it stand out more from a distance than a traditional peak like Lion's Head. That flat surface also makes it an incredibly easy mountain to walk across. You need special equipment to reach the summit of most mountains. For Table Mountain, you need to hike for three hours or take a five minute aerial cableway ride. They can cram more than five dozen people into each cable car, but the cars rotate a full 360 degrees during each ride, so everyone gets a view of everything on the way up or down. Riding the aerial cableway reminded me of the ropeway up Mt Misen on Miyajima. Not that the Miyajima cable car rotated. But at each stop, people got off the cars and huddled around the station, taking pictures and taking in the view. At both locations, if you keep walking for a few minutes, the view gets infinitely better.
Walking around the top of Table Mountain felt like walking on an alien landscape. I assume. I have never actually been to another planet. The sky looks just like Earth, but the ground is rock and scattered fynbos. There is a type of aloe that is only on Table Mountain. Unless you know it is aloe, it could be any alien plant. On most of the mountain top, you cannot see that you are even on a mountain. It looks like a vast rocky plain in every direction, except you can tell that you are at a higher elevation. It feels nothing like Kansas. Other than birds, most of the animals are tiny. The biggest creature I ever saw on Table Mountain was a dassie. Baboons used to roam the flat top, but they all left 30 years ago to find easier food, the experts decided. If you go at the right time, you can find yourself in the middle of the table cloth, a thin layer of clouds that drape themselves over the mountain, like cloth over a table. From the City Centre and Harbour, it looks like a white waterfall pouring over the mountain. On the mountain, it looks like sudden fog rolling in. I almost expected to hear some John Carpenter synthesizer music. I highly recommend it, though it takes some lucky timing. I went up Table Mountain a few times and only got covered by the table cloth once.
with Robben Island, Table Bay, Bloubergstrand
Photograph by Tom Podmore
Just a reminder, I did not take any of these photographs. These are placeholders until I can replace them with my own. I am attempting to give credit to the photographers when I know who they are.
