Category: Cape Town

Today, depressingly, is my very last full day of my seven month journey! I booked a ferry ticket to head out and see Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and others were held as political prisoners for many years. The island name comes from the Dutch word for seal, so there were many seals as well as penguins about.

Robben Island lies just off the coast and can be reached on a 30 minute ferry ride. It has served as a defence post, leper colony, and prison for different eras in its history and now also serves as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Once we arrived on the island we were given an hour bus tour around the island before visiting the prison. On the tour we were shown a leper grave yard, military installations from WWII, and the living quarters of the staff who lived out there.

After that we were dropped off for a tour of the prison grounds. Interestingly, our tour guide through the prison had been incarcerated there himself for five years due to his political affiliations. The prison itself is not all that big and it was divided into sections for different kinds of prisoners, so political prisoners were kept separate from violent criminals. Also, prisoners were treated more harshly depending on the color of their skin and rations were more generous for lighter skinned inmates.

The political prisoners who acted as leaders of their political organisations were all kept together in the same cell block. Conditioned began to improve over the decades due to international pressure. We were told how prisoners would share information with other isolated groups by putting messages into tennis balls and then ‘accidentally’ hitting them over the walls to neighbouring cell blocks while using the tennis courts.

One of Nelson Mandela’s guards became a close personal friend of his and even served in his administration when he became president. He continued to live out on the island and run a coffee shop, but he was away on vacation when we were there.

Nelson Mandela’s cell was shown with the few items of furnishing prisoners were allowed to have: a thin mattress, a metal bowl, a metal cup, a small table, and a trash can. For nine hours every day all prisoners who were convicted to hard labor would have to mine a limestone quarry on the island. It was just mined for satisfying the hard labor requirement and the lime was often just dumped in the ocean overnight.

Woke up to beautiful clear weather – a nice side effect of a good rain storm. Word on the street says Table Mountain is more likely to be clear in the morning than later in the day, so I thought it would be best to start heading in that direction. The mountain has a flat table-like top and the clouds that cover it and roll off the side are known as the table cloth.

Like many cities around the world, Cape Town has a double decker red bus hop on hop off tour circuit (which are all owned by the same global company). Among its featured stops was the cable car station that whisks you up to the top of the mountain. South Africans have been gloating over the fact that Table Mountain was named one of the seven new wonders of the natural world last year. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site, the only one that allows you to view a completely different UNESCO World Heritage site from it (namely Robbens Island).

The Table Mountain stop was number 13 on the bus tour circuit, so it took us a little while to get there. The circuit before then was very interesting and full of streets lined with beautiful colonial Dutch and British buildings. We also passed Desmond Tutu’s old church and an entirely wiped District Six neighbourhood that used to be occupied by black South Africans before they were cleared out during the Apartheid years. It remains deserted today and stands as a sort of memorial to those who once lived there.

The ride up to the top of Table Mountain was in a big revolving cable car that tested your fear of heights – especially when it got up near the top, 1000+ meters above sea level, where you could see the cliffs falling down off the other side. It was very spectacular to be on top and to look down on the city and beaches below. A ridge of mountains extended south of the top towards the peninsula known as The Cape of Good Hope. I hiked a circuit around the top to look off the various sides before heading back down to continue my bus tour. It was much colder up on top than it was 1000 meters below along the beaches.

Most of the rest of the bus tour took a circuit through a very expensive and exclusive series of beach neighbourhoods along the coast. All in all, Cape Town has proven to be a very beautiful city that must be among the most beautiful in the world!

We left our final backpacking accommodation in Swellendam to roll into Cape Town as early as possible. Our guides were finishing up their 3 week work with us and had the next week off before they were expected to embark on some other tours. The biggest problem for them was that we were in Cape Town and they lived in Soweto in the Johannesburg area – which was 1400 kilometers or 15 hours of driving away! Once they dropped the rest of us off at our accommodation, it was time to hit the highway again for a very long drive back home.

While most of my traveling companions checked into cheap backpacker places, I decided to check into something a little more upscale for my final weekend of travel. I was greeted at the front by a doorman who insisted on hitting a gong and announcing the arrival of “Lord Day” to others in the hotel lobby. It was actually a bit embarrassing, but I was glad they were able to check me in early and give me an enormous suite with full kitchen, laundry, and separate lounge.

I spent most of the remainder of the day exploring a bit of Cape Town, buying groceries for my fridge, and plotting what to do over the next few days here. By evening the clouds opened up and it started to pour – a phenomenon I haven’t seen since I arrived in South African three weeks ago!

We awoke to freezing conditions in Oudtshoorn that made me not want to get out of my sleeping bag, but we had quite a bit of ground to cover before the end of the day.

I had mixed feelings about packing up my tent one last time. On the one hand, it was too cold and the frame metal was difficult to handle with hints of frost on it. One the other hand, I was greatly relieved that I would never need to pitch or pack up this tent again! The tents we have been using would have been described as “World War II Surplus” when I was a kid. They were very heavy, bulky, and awkward to handle with thick canvas material and a metal frame with steel poles that were connected by rope segments attached to the outside between each pole segment. They were very durable and roomy once you set it up, but nothing like the lightweight tents I’ve become used to using.

On our way out of Oudtshoorn we drove through a region of huge ostrich farms. This area is the largest ostrich farming region in the world. They are raised for their feathers, meat, eggs, and leather. We stopped for pictures along the way and got to see mating rituals being performed by the male and female birds.

The drive to our next and final night of this trip took us through beautiful mountain ranges as we got closer and closer to Cape Town. Our last night on the way was in the little town of Swellendam which is famous for its vineyards and colonial Dutch architecture. We made about four stops at various vineyards in the area for obligatory wine tasting before arriving at our backpacker accommodation.

That evening we all went out to dinner for a final meal together before our tour was scheduled to finish the following morning. This restaurant was much nicer than the one we stopped at in Durban. I had a huge rack of ribs that I shared around with the others at the table. It was a very nice evening.