Looks like SF, right?
Written by Kate on the plane to KL that left50 hours late...
What author was it who said, “you can never go home again?” I have been thinking about that dude a lot this past week.
I came to Cape Town to study when I was 20 and returned when I was 21 to work for a few months. It was the first time in my life I was truly far away from home. It was the first time I could legally drink and it was the first time since being a very small child when I didn’t have to study most of the time. It was glorious. I got the worst grades of my life, gained 7 lbs from alcohol, fell in love with a boy (in the big picture that might not have been the best idea, but at the time it sure was nice) and made some life long friends. Cape Town seemed enchanted.
Bo Kaap
It has been slowly occurring to me that it was being 20 that was enchanting. It was my age, the opportunities I had and the friends I made that makes Cape Town glisten in my memory, not the city itself. This time around, the city wasn’t so great. To start with, Cape Town is a car town, and car towns always depress me. In this case, it is a car town full of horrifyingly rude drivers, honking, cutting people off, consistently swearing out their window. We watched as not a single car would let a bus merge back into the suburban street we stayed on. Not one. It wasn’t that the bus was going to go slow, the traffic on that street is already pretty slow, they just didn’t let him in. Not a one. I had gotten used to the rude driving and started to expect and predict the yelling and honking and tailgating. At one point Andrew slowed down at a yellow light and stopped as it turned red. The car behind him didn’t honk, or shout or get super close, and I was surprised. We looked back and it was a young mom with little kids in the backseat. We decided she had precious cargo and maybe was a bit more chilled out than other drivers. Low testosterone and all. The next intersection was a roundabout and Andrew slowed down before entering it (a good idea since a car was coming). She started honking and waving and yelling then. So much for low testosterone. I haven’t even mentioned yet the South African love of drunk driving. A South African woman said to me that what “First Worlders” don’t understand is that everyone can’t always follow all the laws. I thought, yes, but maybe they could follow a few more? Just a few? How about most people following the law about stopping at red lights? That could be a start.
View from Champan's Peak Drive. Stunning but treacherous
When we were in Botswana a fellow guest at our camp gave Andrew an earful about how Cape Town was a “world class city.” This was unfortunate because we kept thinking, “Umm, world class eh? Which city were you in?” The man was a Republican, and we all know they don’t care about issues like public transport, so it really is possible that under his definition, Cape Town is a world class city. Not under my definition. Yesterday, while we were waiting for our plane, we took the hop-on hop-off bus tour through Cape Town. From the second story of a bus it is a much nicer city. From up high you don’t notice the horrid driving. From up high you don’t notice all the folks begging at stopped cars or trying to sell random things at stop lights. (It is even harder to drive when the people in the road WANT to be in the way of the cars). From a hop-on hop-off tour, you aren’t faced with negotiating a terrible public transportation system. So, my best guess is that our fellow campmate stayed in the Waterfront, Cape Town’s version of Fisherman’s wharf, which is really a giant outdoor mall complex, (again, he was a Republican, from the South, no less, so maybe someone who prefers giant malls to real urban spaces) and took the hop-on hop-off bus. If he did it right he never had to drive a car, or pass a shanty town.
At the waterfront, kind of like home, but a bit better
Cape Town is a lot like San Francisco. In fact, it is creepily like San Francisco. It has the ports with the giant cranes, it has hills and water, and huge neighborhoods built on sand. Just like home, no matter what clothes you wear in Cape Town, they will be wrong, and you will either be cold, or hot, or many days, both. The main party street in Cape Town, Long Street, feels just like Haight Street does at home. Like San Francisco, Cape Town is the gay capital of the country. It also has a wine country nearby. There is a waterfront development that is modeled after the SF waterfront, but claims it has learned from our mistakes. Unlike SF though, there are townships around the city with 2 million+ folks living in substandard housing and often without basic services. Also, every door and window has burglar bars and houses all have giant walls around them. We had four locks to negotiate getting into our rented room.
Table Mountain + giant Coke case sculpture
A South African travel magazine did a comparison between San Francisco and Cape Town: which one was the better town for tourists. According to the magazine Cape Town’s Waterfront was better, because it was still a working port unlike Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. San Francisco had better year round culture though with all our theaters, music and museums. The issue that tipped it in Cape Town’s favor, according to the article, was the signature sight. Apparently, Table Mountain is more impressive than the Golden Gate Bridge. To which I have a lot to say. 1. No shit, the whole of Table Mountain is cooler than the Golden Gate Bridge, it is just a bloody bridge. However, if you compare apples with apples and look at the total of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, SF probably wins out. 2. There aren’t roving gangs hiding out in the Golden Gate National Recreation area waiting to mug tourists. In Cape Town, we were told not to climb the mountain, or, to do it in large groups because there were dudes living up there waiting to steal our money with big guns. While we were there, the city announced it would start sending teams of highly armed police to guard tourists who want to hike the mountain. The only thing you have to fear on the Golden Gate Bridge is that someone may decide to jump. Not good, but not exactly armed mugging either. 3. As a tourist, it doesn’t matter how cool each individual sight is in a city if you can’t get between them without fearing bodily harm or death. In San Francisco, you can tourist around for a few days without a car and have a grand time. You can even party at night and stumble back to your hotel presuming you are staying downtown. This is not true for Cape Town. With the exception of that (pretty expensive) hop-on hop-off bus, it is pretty darn hard to get places and do things without a car and being in, much less driving, a car is dangerous and stressful in Cape Town. Oh, and forget partying. It is dangerous to be traveling at night, so unless you are staying above the bar, all night festivities are hard to organize. Sorry tourist magazine, but you are measuring the wrong things there, folks. Now, I have to admit, I am not sure I would put San Francisco on the list of world class cities. It isn’t dense enough nor does it have good enough transport to earn a unequivocal spot on that list. Still, if you have neither visited Cape Town nor San Francisco, and you want a few days of fun and you are not interested in what Andrew calls “poverty tourism” I would have to suggest San Francisco as your destination. I will admit Cape Town’s waterfront is a bit nicer. Locals actually go there to have a good time. That seemed kind of sweet until I realized it is the only place around where you can wander without being afraid for your life: there are no cars and lots of cops. Of course folks go there to chill, it is their only option.
Local Winery
I don’t mean to be all down in the mouth, we had some lovely moments, it just didn’t live up to the hype. We went to the Bo-Kaap, the colorful Cape Malay area and walked around and had lovely food. We walked through downtown, which was remarkably more cleaned up and felt much safer then it did 12 years ago. We drove to a beach town and had fish and chips at a local institution. This was one of the most multicultural places we visited, full of every kind of person. Delicious food and excellent people watching We also had some quality penguin time, which is always good. We attended our first rugby game on Saturday night. The local team, “the Stormers” were beaten badly by a visiting Australian team. The guys sitting next to us were more then happy to explain the game to a couple of tourists and our seats had views of Table Mountain. It ended up being a way more interesting game than I ever expected. Much to my surprise, I didn’t really get bored.
After the game we bought sausages on the street and then walked back to our garden flat. We rented the garden flat in the backyard of a empty-nest couple in the area near the University. From our flat we could walk to some restaurants and a grocery store, but alas not much else, which was disappointing. We could though, walk to and from Rugby and that was pretty cool. On Monday, we visited a local winery, which had been once of my favorite places when I lived in Cape Town. It was still gorgeous, but much more fancy. We also did a few deadly boring things like pay our taxes, go to the dentist and get my hair cut.
The Rugby Game
Wild Coast
By Wednesday, we were ready to move onto Asia. We spent the afternoon at Cape Point enjoying what we thought would be one last moment of cool air. The next morning we packed our selves up, returned the car and boarded the plane. As you know, we promptly, two hours later, un-boarded the plane and spent 2 more nights in Cape Town hoping that at some point our plane would leave. Well, as I write this we are in the air above somewhere. The in-flight entertainment is not working, which is very sad, but the plane does appear to be making its way to Malaysia.
Franschoek
Franschoek
South Africa is a gloriously beautiful country. We drove along coast line that took our breath away. We drove through mountains and past dams unlike what we find at home. We drove past farms that made us think, “yeah, I can see why a European settler would want that.“ The drive down the mountain into Franschoek opened from a mountain to a picture perfect wine valley. There is no part of California’s wine country that can begin to compare to the wine estates blending into mountains of the Western Cape. As we drove we were constantly in awe of the scenery. Just this same, it might be stunning, but this country is, as the South Africans say, stuffed up.
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