African Tour:Cape Town part 4

A few of us went paragliding one fine sunny day. On Signal Hill, we signed some papers. As an American, this made perfect sense to me. The people we were putting our lives into the hands of needed to protect themselves. My Taiwanese friends found it suspicious. They are not from a litigious culture. If you die while doing something risky, that is an unlucky day, not a lawsuit.

Paperwork out of the way, we all strapped into separate contraptions. Since this was tandem paragliding, each of us went with a “pilot”. The passenger sat on a little cushion while the pilot lay back on a much bigger cushion. Had we plummeted to our deaths, I doubt that padding on our butts would have made much difference. Looking up at the wing, I never worried about it. The wing was nothing like a flimsy World War II parachute. It was made of some science fiction material in a complicated structural design. When the pilot explained how air flows into the wing through tiny holes, I knew someone put far more thought into it than I ever would have. I saw a video once of someone paragliding and the straps to their wing broke. The wing kept flying, but obviously they did not. Our harness was attached to the wing by a dozen different lines on each side. That wing was not going anywhere without us.

We left the earth from a large tarp rather than the grass. I still have no idea why. Running off the edge of Signal Hill felt a little counterintuitive at the time, but since everything was designed properly and the pilot knew what he was doing, we started going up before gravity even had a chance to bring us down. Within seconds, we were floating above Sea Point, a beach community separated from the city centre by Signal Hill. We headed straight for the Atlantic, which might sound like a bad idea, but on the highly unlikely chance that you crash, it is better to crash in the water than into someone's house or on a busy street. More importantly, once over the water, the pilot can turn around and face toward Signal Hill, Lion's Head, Table Mountain, and the Twelve Apostles. Superman could not get a better view.

While over the water, the pilot asked me how adventurous I was. There is no way that cannot be a loaded question, so I told him to do whatever he was planning. Before I knew it, we were upside down. I thought he was making a sharp turn, which he did, but then the turn kept going and we did a quick loop. Before we left Signal Hill, each pilot asked each passenger if they were afraid of heights. Our reactions told them how gentle they had to be with us in the air. None of my Taiwanese friends ever went upside down.

Landing required more than a few turns to slow us down. I thought we were going to the beach, but we landed in a flat park on the Sea Point Promenade. Touchdown was surprisingly gentle. Our paragliding trip was outstanding, but that company only launched from Signal Hill and only flew over Sea Point. At least for tandem rides. If you know how to do it yourself, the options in Cape Town are practically unlimited. If you want to hire someone to fly you around, you go where they go.

West Coast National Park Marine Protected Area
Photograph by Peter Chadwick

Langebaan Lagoon
On a completely different day, we stayed much closer to sea level. Just up the coast from Cape Town is the West Coast National Park Marine Protected Area. The park is a birdwatcher's paradise, but we went for the water. Since Langebaan Lagoon does not allow any commercial vehicles, everyone goes there to swim and sail. We went to kayak. The calm lagoon did not provide any challenges, but Kraal Bay and the white sandy beaches were well worth the trip.

The national park ends at the northern tip of the lagoon. There are a few houses and B&Bs before you reach the city of Langebaan. Nature gets replaced by expensive houses, restaurants, and a yacht club long before you reach Langebaan Beach. On the southern end of the lagoon, the only thing you are going to see between water and sky are beaches, rocky coasts, and a lot of green. And boats on the water. We never saw any jet skis or loud boats. The lagoon looks like a great place to ride a jet ski. It is also a bird sanctuary, so maybe noisy boats are not allowed. Every boat we saw that day was a catamaran. There were a few houseboats in Kraal Bay, but not enough to spoil the view. They were nothing like the houseboats of Amsterdam. I never looked into it, but my impression was that they were vacation rentals. Assuming you have daily access to a boat, that would not be a bad place to vacation.

Venus Pool
A different kayak ride on a different day took us down the Cape Peninsula. Or at least down part of it. Rounding the cape in a kayak would be unnecessarily dangerous. Thousands of ships designed to sail around the world are buried at the Cape of Good Hope. Kayaks are not designed to cross oceans.

We were pretty much on our own at Langebaan Lagoon. They gave us the kayaks and let us run wild. The lagoon kept us from wandering too far away. The Cape Peninsula covers a much larger area and is surrounded by much deeper water. This one was a guided tour by necessity. We stayed on the False Bay side for a reason. While you can kayak on the Atlantic coast, it is more dangerous. You only have to go a few kilometers out to reach deep water. False Bay slopes down gradually. You would have to paddle for at least 40 kilometers out of the bay before the ocean floor plummets.

From Windmill Beach in Simon's Town, we went north for a few minutes for the sole purpose of kayaking with penguins. On Foxy Beach, you can look at penguins from a separate walkway. On Boulders Beach, you can build sand castles with penguins on the rare occasion they make their way over the boulders. Out in the water between the two, you can try to swim with penguins, but they are far more cautious than they are on land. That makes sense when their predators live in the water. They are probably unaware of how dangerous humans on land can be.

For whatever reason, penguins are not at all afraid of kayaks. They seem to know that a kayak is not a seal or shark. Like dolphins to boats, they wanted to swim along with us. As soon as we stopped, they lost interest and swam away. They were attracted to the movement of the kayaks, not the annoying people inside. Kayaking alongside a swimming penguin was easy. Petting a swimming penguin was impossible.

Down the east coast of the Cape Peninsula is the Venus Pool, one of several natural tide pools in Table Mountain National Park. Venus Pool is larger than a backyard swimming pool, though not as deep. If not for all the rocks, it would be an excellent place to teach a child how to swim. Had we brought snorkels, it would have been a great place to go snorkeling. You get plenty of sea life in calm water protected from the rest of the bay. My friends were surprised to see so many mussels and starfish in their natural habitat. Back home, you would only see them for sale as food.

Part of the tide pool is bordered by flat rocks that happen to be a great place to sit and take a break. They look like they were built by humans on purpose, but nature constructed them without our convenience in mind. Everything about the pool begged us to stay all day, but we were on a guided kayak tour. We had to hit the open water.

Paddling back to Simon's Town, we spotted several otters. Rather than huddle together in a group, they were spread out over a two kilometer stretch of water. Most of them were swimming with far more grace and skill than any of us were working our kayaks. Some stood on the rocks along the shore and watched us. They were all smart enough to stay away. We knew from their body language alone that we would not have any otters swimming alongside us that day. Petting a penguin is rare, but not impossible. I think the only way to pet an otter would be if it was sick or captive. When dry, their fur looked soft and a little luxurious, not that any were ever going to let us near them. When wet, they looked like tiny seals. Their fur almost resembled thick skin. Their webbed feet were also more obvious. That webbing was not at all noticeable on land.

While kayaking along the cape and in the lagoon, I knew I would probably never do any of this ever again. I could very well find myself in a kayak someday, but most likely in a different location. If I lived in Cape Town, I could go outdoors every day and explore every inch of the city. We were there for such a short amount of time, I never dug below the surface.

African Tour:Cape Town part 3

We all took a sundowner cruise one evening. A sundowner is not some South African slang to describe the sunset, though it does take place at sunset. Instead, it is a social ritual where people drink alcohol and maybe have some light snacks while watching the sun go down. I heard the word in Durban, though rarely. Since Durban is on the east coast, sunsets are not nearly as popular as they are in Cape Town, which has countless scenic spots to watch the sun disappear behind the ocean or mountains. On this night, we were on the deck of a boat in Table Bay.

The sunset cruise was pretty short, but we had champagne, cheese, and the sunset. As a bonus, a few people got seasick. The water was calm. The boat barely moved at all while we were anchored in the bay, and every single one of us lives on an island. Even so, some of my colleagues had a hard time adjusting to the lack of solid ground. It was definitely not too much champagne. We were only given one glass each.

We saw none of these.
On a different day, a few of us were on a different boat in a different bay. The sunset cruises mostly left from the V&A Waterfront because that is at Table Bay Harbour, where most of Cape Town's boat traffic parks. If you want to watch whales, you go to False Bay. Even though the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet at Cape Agulhas, the warm Indian currents mix with the colder Atlantic in False Bay. That makes it an ideal breeding ground for all sorts of sea creatures. Whales go to False Bay to breed and eat tiny fish. Dolphins go to False Bay to frolic and catch fish. Seals just live there and lie out on rocks. Great white sharks go to False Bay to eat everybody.

Normally, our house in Simon's Town was far from whatever we wanted to do. Table Bay Harbour was more than an hour away without traffic. Sea Point and Table Mountain were barely closer, though a more scenic drive. On this day it was terribly convenient. We boarded a tiny boat at the Simon's Town Pier less than two kilometers from the house. We mostly sailed around the Cape Peninsula in the Table Mountain National Park Marine Protected Area. There was a marine biologist on the boat who told us far more about all the animals we wanted to see than we could ever remember. She made it clear that winter was the best time to see southern right whales, but that a few liked to linger around at the beginning of spring. Humpback whales mostly came out during the summer, but some showed up early. She told us that we might be able to see both if we were lucky. We were not.

Humpback whales are slightly smaller than southern right whales, but more people want to see the humpbacks because they are more flamboyant. Both like to poke out of the water from time to time, but humpbacks jump out with a flourish and crash onto their backs. Southern right whales mostly just stick their tails out. We only saw some Bryde's whales, which are much smaller. They breach like humpbacks, but since they weigh far less, their crashing down is far less dramatic. After seeing one up close, I had my doubts if that was the type of whale I saw from the house balcony. I assume it was an early humpback since I saw so much of it so far away.

We saw a few of these.
The dolphins were more abundant and not nearly as shy as the whales. According to the marine biologist, we saw Heaviside's dolphins and dusky dolphins. I could not tell the difference to save my life. Apparently, the dusky dolphins were the more acrobatic cousins. They did all kinds of circus tricks for us without any humans blowing a whistle or offering fish. Obviously, they did it for themselves and did not care about our amusement, but they were curious about our boat.

And a lot of these.
Outside of the Table Mountain National Park Marine Protected Area, we went to Seal Island. In the water, most of the animals wisely stayed away from us. On Seal Island, we saw thousands of brown fur seals just lying out on the rocks as if a boat full of humans was not something they should fear. Their biggest predator is the great white shark, who likes to fly out of the water at 40 km/h while grabbing seals from below. Fortunately for the seals, we did not see any sharks that day.

On the way to and from the Simon's Town Pier, we passed the penguin colony at Foxy Beach and saw absolutely no penguins either time. Though thousands of penguins live at the beach year round, none were out and about at the time. The marine biologist told us they were probably out fishing. That was the sort of thing that disappointed most people on the whale watching tour, but my friends and I never worried about it. Our house was a ten minute walk to the beach. The first time we went by land, we saw dozens of penguins. The second time, we saw hundreds. From the boat, we would have seen penguins at a distance. On the beach, they were up close and personal.

There was a time when you could swim with the penguins. Today, people are prohibited on Foxy Beach, which is where most of the penguins nest and waddle. Instead, there is a raised walkway to let visitors walk around the beach without actually touching the sand. The penguins are free to walk around without interference. People can go to Boulders Beach, which is separated from Foxy Beach by large boulders. Every once in a while, a penguin or two will climb or swim from one beach to the other, so it is physically possible to chill on the beach with penguins, but the vast majority of them stay on the protected Foxy side.

African Tour: Cape Town part 2

As with Johannesburg and Durban, there were plenty of guided tours scheduled in Cape Town. When you take an entire company to a strange new world across the planet to work for a couple of months, it is always a good idea to provide some diversions in between rehearsals. I understood why we had so many guided tours. I simply preferred to wander around on my own or with a few friends. I skipped most of the guided tours in Cape Town, but a few sounded interesting, and one or two are pretty much required of all visitors.

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

By far the best botanic garden in all of Africa. Or at least of the three I saw in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. Since it was spring, everything was in full bloom. Since I know pretty much nothing about horticulture, all I saw were a bunch of pretty flowers. They also had an exhibit on the geology of the area and how the Cape Peninsula was formed. It was all rocks to me. I thought the flowers looked nicer.

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.

Canopy Walkway
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

Iziko South African National Gallery
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

Photograph by Iwan Baan
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

Across piers from MOCAA is the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, an outdoor tourist shopping mall on the harbor. Like Pier 39 in San Francisco, it is worth a visit. Once. People call it the V&A or V&A Waterfront, which made me think it was named the Victoria & Albert Waterfront. But it was named after Alfred, one of Victoria and Albert's sons. Brits probably learned about all of these people in school, but South Africans do not seem to care about that entitled family at all.

Canal Walk Shopping Centre
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

Photograph by T Holi
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

The Rhodes Memorial is a controversial site because Cecil Rhodes was a white supremacist who helped oppress the indigenous South African population. With his fortune from mining blood diamonds, he got into politics and championed laws that would hurt the people of South Africa for the next century. Though a reprehensible human being, he died wealthy enough to remain famous today. He has memorials in Cape Town and Kimberley, Northern Cape. Through his mining monopoly, he helped make diamonds ridiculously expensive and bought large chunks of land throughout southern Africa, including what is now the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden and Nyanga National Park in Zimbabwe, and started the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. Rhodes University in Makhanda, Eastern Cape was named after him, as was the entire country of Rhodesia until they changed it to Zimbabwe.

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

Most of our guided tours were within the Cape Town city limits. The biggest exception was when we had a look at some vineyards.

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

The most eagerly anticipated guided tour in Cape Town by pretty much all of us was at two different spots on the Cape Peninsula. Though any of us could have gone to either at any time, and most of us returned a few times, having a guide who knew their way around the first time we went was invaluable.

Cape of Good Hope
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.

Table Mountain Cableway
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.

From any of the ledges on the plateau, you can definitely tell you are on a mountain. They have walkways and viewing platforms at the northern ledge because that faces downtown Cape Town and Table Bay. At over 1000 meters above sea level, there is no better vantage point anywhere in the city. From the western ledge, you look down on Clifton, Camps Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. The rocky eastern ledge faces the vast Table Flats. It also holds Maclear's Beacon, a rock mound set up by an Irish astronomer almost 200 years ago. At five meters tall, it is the highest point on Table Mountain, which makes it the highest point in Cape Town. The southern side slopes downhill, with more mountain than table, so there is no dramatic ledge from which to stand in amazement. But it is the infinitely easier side to hike up and down.

Camps Bay and Lion's Head from Table Mountain

Lion's Head, Signal Hill, City Centre
with Robben Island, Table Bay, Bloubergstrand
Photograph by Tom Podmore

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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.

African Tour:Cape Agulhas

Cape Agulhas
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.

L'Agulhas, South Africa

African Tour:Cape Town part 1

Cape Town International Airport
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.

Not the actual balcony, but pretty close.
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.

Artscape Theatre Centre
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.

African Tour:Durban

Lanseria International Airport
Johannesburg, South Africa

King Shaka International Airport
Durban, South Africa
Our flight to Durban was short and easy. We spent more time in the terminal than on the plane, though there were no delays this time. Rather than fly out of OR Tambo International Airport, we left Johannesburg from Lanseria International Airport, a much smaller airport. It has international in its name, but I only saw signs for flights to other cities in South Africa.

The drive to the hotel was also faster. At least for four of us. Instead of piling everyone into a business hotel, we all stayed at apartments and B&Bs around town. I have no idea if that was a better arrangement, and I doubt it was more efficient, but I liked it a lot more. There was nothing wrong with the hotel in Johannesburg. It was a clean place to sleep and close to major thoroughfares. In Durban, I stayed with three other dancers in a nice little apartment in the Morningside neighborhood. We were an easy walk to Mitchell Park, a Spar grocery store, Florida Road, and Battery Beach.

The grocery store was convenient since we were in an apartment instead of a hotel. The apartment's kitchen was more than adequate and was even stocked with a few staples right before we arrived. The husband and wife owners lived close by and were happy to help out with pretty much anything we needed. Caroline brought us homemade rusks every morning, which we all appreciated even if we never ate them until later in the day. She even drove us to the grocery store when we made our biggest run. There was a washer and dryer directly below the apartment, but we found the washer difficult to use. Betty, the housekeeper, did all of our laundry for most of our stay. I felt a little bad about having an older black woman wash my clothes, especially in a South African apartment owned by a white couple, but she did an incredible job. Whenever we put anything in the laundry bags, it came back cleaned, ironed, and neatly folded. No one ever charged us anything for the laundry, so we left Betty a decent tip before we checked out. My Taiwanese roommates thought that everyone should do the best job they could regardless of their pay, but I convinced them that in tipping cultures, it is always a good idea to tip well for exceptional service. I had the same conversation every time any of us went to a restaurant.

Betty was the highlight of Durban. She probably had a fascinating life story, but was reluctant to talk about herself, so I never pushed her. Something she loved to talk about were her grandchildren, which made my roommates feel bad that she was cleaning up after us. The cultural differences were interesting. Where I had white guilt and never really thought about her age, they had generation guilt and never thought about her race. For her part, Betty seemed to have the meaning of life sorted out. I would not mind spending a day as content as she always was.

Florida Road is this week's trendy restaurant street. We saw plenty of tip jars. It had Spiga, a vaguely Italian café with a lot of penne dishes; Glamwich, a haven for avocado toast and bunny chow; Times Square, which always seemed more popular at drinking time than at eating time; Bird & Co, a chicken and pizza place that looked like fast food at restaurant prices; Paul's Homemade Ice Cream, which had confusing flavors, like the vegan “No Cow and Chicken”. I understand the no cow part, but never knew ice cream had chicken in it; House of Curries, with the largest bunny chow menu; the Firehouse, a pizza place with trendy toppings like avocado, toasted coconut, cashews, and teriyaki sauce; Sofra Istanbul, a Turkish restaurant with frozen french fries; Sabroso, with its generic Mexican menu; Fired Up Pizzeria, with pizzas so ugly, I did not even want to step inside; Flamin' Wok, a vaguely Thai restaurant with fortune cookies; and Tommy's Sushi, with “Chinese takeaway”. It was not Chinese. There were even more restaurants on the next block. The entire street was wall to wall restaurants. We could have eaten at a different place every day, even without going to other parts of the city.

The Thai place was noteworthy, even though no one thought it tasted like Thai food. They had fortune cookies, which I had to explain to my Taiwanese colleagues, who had never heard of such a thing. There is something surreal about sitting in a Thai restaurant in South Africa and describing American Chinese food to Chinese people. My colleagues were flabbergasted when I told them that everyone in the United States thinks Chinese people eat fortune cookies.

Bunny chow had to be explained to all of us. It is a loaf of white bread stuffed with curry. A quarter bunny is more than large enough for one person. Rabbits are not involved in any way. It was invented by Indian immigrants as an explicitly vegetarian dish. There are disputed theories about why they are called bunnies and which restaurant in Durban, if any, has the original. Fortunately, we asked what bunny chow was early in the trip. We would see it on more than a few menus throughout Durban.

Transportation in Durban was a little more complicated than Johannesburg. Rather than pick everyone up from one hotel in a charter bus, our drivers went to all of our different apartments and drove us around in cars. That meant we never all arrived at rehearsals at the same time, which meant more time in transit despite driving shorter distances. Guided tours were also more complicated. Everyone was driven by car to a meeting point and then driven as a group by bus to whatever tourist trap was on the agenda that day. I mostly avoided all of that, with a few exceptions.

Gateway Theatre of Shopping
Umhlanga, South Africa
When everyone else went to the Gateway Theatre Of Shopping in Umhlanga, a few of us took the bus and went to Umhlanga Beach. The Gateway Theatre Of Shopping claims to be the “largest shopping mall in the Southern Hemisphere”. Umhlanga Beach is famous for its lighthouse and rocky coast just beyond the soft sandy beach. With a long promenade right next to the beach, it is a great place to walk on sand or pavement, though a lousy spot for surfing or swimming. There was no way any of my colleagues would want to swim in an ocean anyway.

Umhlanga Beach
Photograph by LC Swart
When everyone took a bus to the Pavilion Shopping Centre in Westville, I walked down the Golden Mile. From the pictures I saw, the Pavilion looked a little like the Taipei 101 mall. One of the stores at the mall is a Christian bookstore called CUM Books. Being immature, this caught my attention. I was disappointed to learn that CUM stands for Christelike Uitgewers Maatskappy, which means Christian Publishing Company in Afrikaans. The Golden Mile is both a beach and several beaches along a seven kilometer stretch from Blue Lagoon Beach to the North Pier. It has none of the famous rocks of Umhlanga Beach up the coast, which makes it a much better place for surfing and swimming. It has the “longest beachfront promenade in sub-Saharan Africa”, which only made me curious where the longest promenade in North Africa was. The promenade and beaches were an easy walk from our apartment, so I went there more than a few times. The first time I went into the water, I thought it was my first time in the Indian Ocean. Then I remembered that I did some beach swimming in Bali almost ten years ago.

Not that I avoided all the guided tours. I went with the group to the Durban Botanic Gardens, which was far more botanic than the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens in Johannesburg. It had more flowers, which is probably a good thing. There was even a separate orchid house, the “largest orchid collection in South Africa”, naturally. It was closed that day. The butterfly habitat was open, and a great place to look at butterflies, if you are into that sort of thing. The garden was especially proud of its tree collection. They bragged about their palm trees, which are not so impressive for those of us who live on a tropical island. They also had a lot of jacaranda trees, which are common in South Africa and not something we ever see at home. Even though we were there while the flowers were in bloom, the locals did not seem to care. What we found different, they found ordinary, and vice versa. The best part of the gardens was probably the small lake, where we saw more than a few birds I could never identify.

The Durban Natural Science Museum is inside city hall rather than its own dedicated building. It might be the smallest natural science museum I have ever been to, but all the children we saw loved it. That is really all that matters. If you can get them interested when they are still young and care about things, maybe they will care when they get older.

The Umgeni River Bird Park near the mouth of the Umgeni River had even more birds I could never hope to name. I recognized the flamingos, pelicans, swans, owls, toucans, peacocks, macaws, vultures, and those little Australian birds that got Men At Work sued. If they have over 300 species, that means I barely knew any of them. The bird park is essentially a zoo, which is never my favorite place to go. I was in a part of Africa where you can see animals in their natural habitat. Gawking at them in cages is the last thing I want to do, but the Umgeni River Bird Park breeds 17 different endangered species. That has to count for something. It was also free.

The worst guided tour was to the Japanese Gardens, which is a waste of time for anyone who has been to Japan or a garden. It is a park with a few generic Japanese decorations here and there. The only interesting aspect to the Japanese Gardens are the monkeys that wander around. Something we were warned about before we left Taiwan, besides crime, were the baboons in South Africa. Apparently, they are even bigger troublemakers than macaques. The monkeys we saw in the park were smaller and much calmer. Though not at all afraid of us, they never tried to steal anything from anyone.

Next to the Japanese Gardens was Sun Sun Supermarket. Billed as an Asian grocery store “With Everything Asian Under the Sun”, some of my colleagues were excited to check it out. I was more than a little skeptical. Outside of Asia, “Asian” usually means dry noodles and soy sauce. Surprisingly, it looked a lot like a Chinese grocery store, only with far more signs in English. They even had Super Supau, which I have never seen outside of Taiwan. Everyone in the building except me could have been from East Asia, which is what most people outside of Asia mean when they talk about Asia. Nothing west of India ever counts. Though their inventory was much smaller than everything under the sun, my colleagues walked out with full bags.

Watching Taiwanese people shop is an odd experience. We were in a part of the world none of us had ever been to before. Yet instead of buying ceramic giraffes and zebra keychains, they mostly bought clothes made in China and Vietnam from stores similar or exactly the same as what we have at home. When it came to food, the less exotic the better. Even though I could never taste anything, I wanted to try the local dishes. I have no idea what bunny chow tastes like, but I have eaten it in a few different places. They could taste everything, and wanted the most familiar food they could find. Taiwanese would have been preferable, but Chinese would have to do. There was nothing in all those Sun Sun bags they could not buy at home.

The Playhouse Company Theatre
We also did some work with the Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, who were all fantastic.
September to November is spring in South Africa, so I came prepared. Most of my Taiwanese colleagues did not bring bathing suits because we started in October. Several people pointed out the difference between the Southern and Northern Hemisphere, but to the Taiwanese, October is not bathing suit season. I am often baffled by their insistence on dressing for the season rather than the weather. If it is 30 degrees and humid in July, they wear t-shirts and sandals. If it is 30 degrees and humid in December, they wear coats and boots. I thought that being in a different country at a much lower latitude would change that. I was wrong. Almost everyone dressed for Taiwan October, not South Africa October.

We arrived in Durban at the tail end of a storm. You could tell it had been raining for a while, though it took a break before our plane landed. The next few days had scattered thunderstorms and the threat of rain around the corner. Then we woke up to sunny and warm almost every other day. There was one full rainy day in Durban and one day where it rained off and on. Otherwise, it was spring sun and clouds. Every night was colder than a Taiwan winter, but none of the days were nearly as hot. Even on the hottest days, which were always below 30 degrees, there was usually a nice breeze coming from the ocean.

Our apartment did not have a swimming pool, but the house next door did. I mentioned something about how much I like to swim to Caroline during a random conversation and the next day she told me we could use the swimming pool next door. I have to assume they had some kind of previous arrangement with their neighbors to let tenants use it. It seems almost impossible that we were let into a stranger's pool just because I happened to mention it in passing. Regardless of whatever went on behind the scenes, none of my roommates brought bathing suits. That meant I got the swimming pool to myself. The owners of the house with the pool were much older. I got the impression they had not used it in years. Eventually, my roommates wised up and bought bathing suits, even though it was almost November. One afternoon, some of Betty's grandchildren joined us. It did not seem like their first time in that pool. Though Betty never donned a bathing suit, she kept an eye on those children like a meerkat. I wondered what it must have been like for her to watch a white woman, a few Chinese women, and her black grandchildren all swimming in the same water together, and then to know that it would never be an issue for the children.

Johannesburg is much bigger than Durban and probably has more to see and do. I preferred Durban for a few reasons. Our apartment was in a quiet residential neighborhood instead of in the middle of a shopping mall. The people we worked with in both cities were friendly, but the people of Durban were less big city uptight and more small town relaxed. Durban is on the Indian Ocean and has several beautiful beaches. Johannesburg is nowhere near a large body of water. We spent twice as much time in Durban, so I had more opportunity to wander around and explore on my own without any tour guides. I usually wake up before sunrise at home. After adjusting to the time difference in Johannesburg, I did the same most days in Durban. Since Durban is on the east coast, the beaches are an excellent place to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean. Simply walking down the Durban promenade was a better day than any of the scheduled tourist stops in Johannesburg.

Photograph by Liesel Muhl

African Tour:Pretoria

Pretoria is right next to Johannesburg, so there were no flights or sitting around airports all day. The charter bus took less than an hour. We only did two shows, so there was no hotel. We left our Johannesburg hotel in the morning, drove to Pretoria, had a quick rehearsal, did the first show, took a break, did the second show, and took the bus back to the hotel.

State Theatre
Our very temporary home base in Pretoria was the State Theatre, billed as the largest theater in Africa. It did not seem all that big to us, but we quickly found more than a few places that claimed to be the largest of their kind on the entire continent. My impression was that it is similar to every Ray's in New York that claims to be the original. The theater had a decent stage and sound system, and more importantly, ample restrooms backstage, so it worked for us.

Union Building
With limited time between shows, we never strayed far from the central business district. We did some eating, too much shopping, and went to the Union Building Gardens, a hillside park outside the president's house. You cannot actually go inside the Union Buildings because it is the president's house. The park is nice, and since it sits on one of the tallest hills in the city, there was a nice breeze rolling downhill. That is always a good thing between shows.

Photograph by Clayton Majona
We saw why Pretoria is known as the Jacaranda City. Several streets were lined with Jacaranda trees in full bloom. We also saw why some of the locals see them as a nuisance. When thousands of people walk over the fallen flowers, they create a sticky stain that must be a pain in the ass to clean.