After a 9 hour and 45-minute flight we made it to Cape Town, South Africa. It is nice to know we do not have another flight for about 3 weeks! When we arrived both girls claimed it was a quick flight and they barely slept on the ride. In reality, they both slept 5+ hours. The flight was a lot rougher on Elizabeth and I. The South Africa portion of our adventure is one we had a travel company arrange. When we priced purchasing everything individual versus purchasing a package, the tour company actually won. Thus far, the tour has been going great and we are excited about everything that is come next, Anya at Pembury Tours done a great job.
On our arrival, we were transferred to luxury apartments on the waterfront to stay 6-days in Cape Town. The first day we rested and worked on adjusting to the time change, it took the girls like 5 minutes! Elizabeth and I took the rest of the day and we are still trying to fully adjust. The next day we awoke to a rainy overcast day, so we changed our day from going to Table Mountain to a museum tour. Our guide, Lele, was great. Not only did we cover the history of South Africa we also covered a good share of modern politics in both South Africa and America.
We first went to the Castle of Good Hope, which is the oldest building in South Africa. It is opened in 1679 by the Dutch, but later taken over by the British. The Castle was original built as a stop on the trade route between the East and West. Neat fact, the Castle was originally built on the coastline, but the Dutch over time reclaimed nearly a mile more of land, so now it sits about a mile from the coast. I could be wrong, but wasn’t the Dutch who reclaimed land in New York to create large parts of Manhattan?
After visiting the Castle we jumped several time periods. As we understood it in our quick talks, the 1700s, was the period of rule by the French and Dutch, who after fighting for dominance in the area started working together protect themselves from the indigenous people. Then in the 1800s the British showed up in force and took over the area, through war, driving the Dutch more inland. Additionally, during the British rule the indigenous and slaves from the East were freed. Leading into the 1900’s the system of Apartheid, separation of the races, was put in place. This is where we picked up our next museum, District Six Museum.
District Six was an inner-city area of Cape Town, where in the 1970’s 60,000 residents were forcibly removed when the government declared the areas “White”. The museum had a lot of emotion reading both the stories of residents homes being destroyed by machinery when they would leave for work and stories of individuals remember District Six. Since Brooklyn has a small background on the US Civil Rights we used it to explain and reference! We can store that as education hours we need to report to the girls’ home schooling report!
Oh, quick stop by Parliment:
After District Six we moved on to Iziko South African Museum. The museum is small natural science museum, we say small comparing it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York we visited not too long ago. This was the girls’ favorite museum.
After the South African Museum we headed to the Cape Town Aquarium on the Waterfront. However, on the way we made several stops. We drove up to the back end of the Lion’s Head. It is an awesome view over Cape Town, but it was very windy with a slight rain. We stopped at the brightly colored houses, which we learned were painted in celebration of freedom from slavery. To celebrate the freedom of slavery the Bo-Kaap painted their homes a vibrant color, each neighbor selecting a different color. We had a couple additional stops, see images, before making it to aquarium.
The aquarium was nice, even comparable to Ripley’s in Gatlinburg, which we love. We all agree the best thing at the aquarium is the African penguins.
It is another early day tomorrow. We are going to do a community tour where our guide grew up in the Cape Town shanty towns. He moved from the shanty town to middle class, by receiving a scholarship to college. The scholarship allowed him to go to college for tourism and hospitality, which he works in now. He knows six of the eleven languages official recognized in South Africa. He gave us a small lesson of his tribe’s language, which uses a clicking sound for after some characters. We are not going to be fluent anytime soon, it was fun to listen too! We had some interesting conversations of his story and about the scholarships ability to improve recipient’s life including reasons why it may not be working. If you are interested let me know and I will write some of conversations. Anyways, tomorrow should be an interesting day.
Each day Brooklyn and Kaleigh have a countdown to shark diving, they both scared and excited….3 more days by the way.
Chris
