Tales from Gap Yah for Grown Ups

For travellers who’ve been going eastwards round the world, taking a five hour flight westwards from Mauritius to Cape Town was a bit of a wrench but that’s what happens when airlines pull flights for commercial reasons. Despite Anna’s best efforts it proved impossible to fly South Africa-Mauritius-Australia on our Lufthansa tickets.

But hey, Cape Town’s a great spot. It’s not as ominous as Johannesburg and is a rich mix of races rather than just blacks and whites. We put up in a neat little hotel in the Muslim quarter close to Centre Ville called Rouge on Rose and aside from the 5am muezzin, who is at least live and can sing, it’s been great.

We lobbed mid afternoon but hit the ground running by having tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel (a magnificent relic which we joked may allow some oldies to eat one meal a day) and then going up Table Mountain in the cable car.

The latter was chancy because of wind and the inevitable cloud but we got lucky and it cleared after we’d been standing disconsolately around the lower cable station for about ten minutes. Anna had been to Cape Town in 1980 and had “done’’ the cable car but was happy for a second bite.

It provided the wonderful vista you would expect, allowing us to orientate on Day One and look all around, almost to the Cape of Good Hope 50km to the south. The paths along the top have been greatly improved and we also met some dassies, aka rock hyraxes, that look like something between an earless rabbit and a West Australian Quokka. Because there’s often so much cloud on the top, for reasons of cold vs warm air, there’s actually a great deal of foliage they can feed on.

So pleased were we that we then repaired to a tapas joint called Fork and discovered it is more than just a rude word when pronounced with the local accent. It was jumping. despite it being Monday night, and we discovered a South African grape variety called Pinotage, as in Pinot grafted onto Hermitage .

Tuesday was always going to be Robben Island day, since we were booked on a tour starting at 3pm, but we made good use of the morning by checking on my grandfather’s grave  in Maitland Cemetery , about  8kms east of  the city centre.

Ursula, the lady who runs the hotel, said it was a grim place so we were ready for disappointment, but she lined up a friend called Myrtle to take us there and she came good. The grave took a bit of finding as there are two ledgers, one for each end of the huge and somewhat dilapidated cemetery, but a bit of persistence and some help from a former gravedigger called Philip nailed it.

The 1920 headstone’s in perfect order but it’s leaning forward, which I thought could be fixed by some judicious application of concrete. But we quickly worked out it was being pushed over by a bush growing behind it.  Philip, a mixed race guy who’d had a tough life but had a great attitude, said he was retiring in six weeks’ time but could fix it by weed killing the bush then pulling it out, then if necessary applying a bit of mix to steady things. So I gave him some cash and he said he’d get straight onto it, while Myrtle made suitable noises about coming back in a couple of weeks to see how he’d gone.  This one won’t be going through the books but it should produce a result of sorts. 

Robben Island, meanwhile, was absolutely as described in the brochure. There was half a boatload of 13 year old African kids from way inland, some of whom cheered and others squeaked when the ferry started to roll a bit. 

The clear highlight of any such trip is Nelson Mandela’s cell, where he spent around 18 years, but it was reinforced by our being shown around by a former prisoner called Ntando Mbatha. He brought the whole grim place to life and like Mandela he’s ready to forgive, but not forget. The children, black and white, were mesmerized by listening to a real live former prisoner, even though the most dramatic thing he seems to have done was to train with the ANC in Angola. He got around seven years for that.

It’s hard to say much that’s new or insightful about Robben Island except that all the grim stuff happened in our lifetimes and boycotting the notorious Springbok Rugby Tours, not that I did, turned out to be one of the more effective ways of bringing Apartheid to a close. The parallels with the Berlin Wall, by the way, are quite startling, particularly as the outside perimeter of the prison had the same type of guard towers and dog runs that were so notable in Berlin. The bad guys do lose eventually.

Having got back at 6.30pm we headed for a seafood restaurant down by the wharf and shared a “platter for one’’ that included two crayfish halves, a dozen mussels, LOTS of calamari and two sizeable bits of fish. The waiter was right in saying that it should suffice for two.

Wednesday was Cape of Good Hope day. It’s not the southernmost point in Africa but it will do given how far away Cape Agulhas is. We went with Myrtle who has Afrikaans ancestors and thus something of an accent, but a good heart. Highlights included the Kirstenbosch botanical garden with enough proteas to cause Anna to concede it might EVEN be better than Melbourne, and about twice as much wildlife as we expected.

We met: about 200 penguins, two troupes of baboons, four zebras crossing the road, a male and female ostrich, and a pod of whales in a bay on the way back. Our attempts to photograph the zebras, rarest find of the day, were flummoxed by the fact that our good camera lens has sand in it and anyway, they are impeccably camouflaged.

We were also serenaded over lunch in Simonstown (near the navy base) by an a capella singing group of seven guys, followed not long afterwards by a small battered man in an oversize tweed jacket and a bandanna singing a satirical song in Xhosa (we were told) until the security man moved him on. The little man, who was quite feisty, reasonably wanted to know when he was moved on and the others weren’t. Because you’re crap, pal, is what might have been said but that was not in the script. Key point was that the Cape itself is beautiful. As at Augusta in WA you look south and breathe in, knowing there’s nothing between you and the Antarctic. 

On return we were sufficiently knackered to order in a pizza and a nice bottle of white whine, which collectively came in at under $20.The low price excitement carried on into Thursday when we hired a shopping trolley car for the day for about $35 plus petrol.

The main virtue was that no one was giving us relentless detail with a strong accent  but this Chevrolet Spark (hah!) did get us to Stellenbosch and to a cheetah conservation farm at Paardevlei on the coast east of Cape Town. The weather was patchy but we got a good feel for Stellenbosch, spiritual home of what David Dimbleby described as the lost tribe of Africa.

They laugh, drink coffee, chat in the street, study at university, are mad about rugby and do everything we do, but all in a 16^th century form of Dutch with a few bolt-ons. And the handicrafts in their shops are impeccable so we can’t write them off. We haven’t mentioned the Wallabies vs the Springboks in Johannnesburg coming up on Saturday, on the reasonable premise that the locals will win. 

Re the cheetahs, there’s a smart outfit trying to educate farmers about the benefits of having Anatolian sheepdogs (like a Great Dane with attitude) look after their sheep and keep predators away…thus causing fewer cheetah casualties. It was pretty rainy (one of a tiny number of such days we’ve had) but Anna was allowed to pet a cheetah cub called Elsa. She was so excited she forgot she’s allergic to cats….. but no harm done.

For a finale to the day we went to an excellent African restaurant where they have a fixed menu covering about ten dishes from all over Africa. Then, just as we were close to leaving, the entire staff came through singing and dancing to an African drum. In a confined space it was up there with the pipes and drums: brain addling but very uplifting.

On Friday we were off to Johannesburg on Mango Airlines. I sat beside a Qld med student called Annabel who said that the Groote Schur hospital in Cape Town where she had been placed, got an average of six gunshot cases a day, almost all from the black shantytowns. We were at the back of the plane and the wind was shocking near our destination, so we were thrown around more than somewhat and very glad to get on the ground. 

We hired a VW Polo and headed off west to Mafeking, which turned out to be four hours away up near the Botswana border. The road led us past the Marikana mine where 34 miners had recently been shot dead. The wind stirred up the dust horribly from the platinum mine spoil tips and it seemed a pretty hellish place although fortunately, as we headed further west down a progressively narrower road, it cleared. We were looking for “”the real Africa”” and found it in Zeerust, a farming town 40kms short of Mafeking

Zeerust was nominally an Afrikaans town but we saw only one white man there, stomping along in shorts and boots. Everyone else was cheerfully and erratically African, risking death crossing the street and generally chilling. Then it was on to Mafeking or Mafikeng, where my grandfather had been during the siege in 1899. Fortnunately we’d booked into the Protea, best hotel in town, but everything else was untidy and litter strewn, with few buildings more than 50 years old.

Fortunately our waitress at dinner, Lemme, turned out to be a bright spark with a dazzling smile, lifting our dented spirits. Also, the hotel was hosting a “matriculation formal’’  attended by all the teenage leavers from nearby high school, which was noisy and over the top like any formal in Australia. The boys were done up in sharkskin suits, shades etc while the girls teetered around on absurd heels trying not to fall over. That all shows that Mafeking hasn’t stood still. Now its population is almost entirely black and almost entirely cheerful. 

Saturday dawned bright and clear and we had a look around the 1900 graveyard until 10 am when the museum was due to open. Long story short, the staff had all gone on some Heritage Week event elsewhere. Grr. As we later realized, this is the downside of Africa, perhaps mitigated by the fact that local interest in a war 112 years ago between two groups of imperious honkies is thin at best. Why should it be any other way? Mafeking is 99 per cent black these days.

So we decided to alter the angle of attack by going to Mafikeng Game Park and were well rewarded. It’s not lion or leopard country but we got hefty numbers of giraffe, white rhino, warthogs, ostriches, boks various, buffalo , zebras and wildebeest, and that’s despite having  left the binoculars at the hotel. We can now almost tell the difference between a springbok (curly horns) and an eland (straight horns, same colour as a rhino).

And in the afternoon I finally tracked down a Siege relic, being Cannon Kopje. It had nothing to do with my grandfather, who was the civil administrator trying to curtain the occasional excesses of Baden Powell, but it was the scene of a skirmish and featured still visible bunkers made out of old railway line and corrugated iron. Fittingly, it was next to the psychiatric hospital.

We then watched the Wallabies getting comprehensively smeared in Pretoria (31 points to 8) by the Springboks, topping off what had been a disappointing end to what had otherwise been a wonderful trip to South Africa.

Sunday was a travel day, to return the hire car and hopefully see more animals in a reserve up near the Botswana border. You won’t be surprised to hear we wren’t allowed into Botswana because the hire car wasn’t insured, not that we wanted to do anything other than collect another country. And the reserve was a dud after Mafeking, producing nothing more than a raft of springboks, elands and ostriches. If there were rhino around, the hot day kept them under trees.

So we skedaddled back to Johannesburg in the hire car which registered a minor protest by showing us a warning light for the “engine management system’’ about half way back. Somewhat jaded by then, we decided to bat on and to our surprise the light went out when we refueled the car.

As we write this, we’re sitting in the Oliver Tambo International Airport awaiting a flight back to Perth and then another to Sydney. Morale? Anna reasonably pointed out that if she had know the Mafeking leg was going to be such a sweat she wouldn’t have come. But we did it, we’ve seen it and most relevantly we can say we’ve Seen Africa.

And we’ve seen the world. We’re dying to see our gals again  and I’m dreading going back to a real job. But if we were offered the chance to do a similar 11 week trip, I’d take it tomorrow.