Paul Goldberg Blog

Cape Town

With a farewell dinner in Vic Falls the grand group of 16 travelers prepared to go our separate ways. Nine of us to continue on to Cape Town and seven to travel on on their own or to return home. We flew together, one last time, to Johannesburg where the Cape Town gang caught a domestic flight to our last stop on the trip. The return to city life was a bit jarring. No more worry about animals wandering through the camp and no more bush toilets readily available behind a bush. Some even had brought along city clothes. Our hotel, The Inn on the Square is indeed on the central square which houses a daily market of vendors selling the usual trinkets found in every vendors market we had passed throughout the trip. With only one more packing for travel ahead of us some used the opportunity to make purchases. The hotel is very nice and the staff is very helpful, if you are waiting for a “but” here it is. The bathrooms are the smallest we have ever tried to enter. Actually they are less spacious then on our motorhome and made even more difficult by having full size doors that swing in. I had to wedge myself between the toilet and the shower to open or close the door and I needed to close the door because there was no place for me if the door is open.

Enough about minutia. Post Mandela Cape Town is a great mix of contrasts. The people are still grouped into White (European) Black (African) and Colored (sort of everyone else). These categories are not pejorative nor do they speak of apartheid. Rather they are how the people refer to themselves and by choice where they choose to live. The city itself seems to be well integrated. It is in the Townships that the separation is apparent. Townships are a remnant of the old ways. They are “walled off” by expressways and rail lines and internally they are divided into sections depending on when they were built. The outer rings are terrible looking galvanized metal shacks and passing through sections of adobe shacks of two or three rooms eventually we saw newer sections whjere middle income people live and raise their families. We had a home hosted dinner in a private home in a Colored Township. We had a lovely meal and a lot of interesting conversation. We found here as elsewhere a great curiosity about the current election in the US.

The counterpoint to our day in the townships was a tour by five of us to the Stellenbosch Wine District. This is an Africaans area that has been producing wine for some time. We stopped at two wineries for tastings, the second included cheese pairing. The wines were very nice, but nothing I am rushing to buy. Lunch was on our own in Stellenbosch and we agreed on a student populated restaurant with tables on the sidewalk. This is probably as good a place as any to mention money. The Rand had dropped in value before our arrival and a US $ bought 14.2x R while we were there. Menu items ran from 70 to 90 R. The first time I bought dinner on our own in the hotel it came to $18 for the two of us. It was a nice meal with wine!

We did see the obligatory sites including the the Cape of Good Hope:

Yes, that is actually us in  a picture together!
And we went to the gardens where Protea grow in profusion:

This too is a Protea, it is a Silver Leaf
And we saw penguins:

The light house at the Cape of Good Hope – this one has not been used in many years as it is high enough to be fogged in much of the time:
and Table Top looked like this much of the time we were there:
Three of our party made it up the cable car the morning of our departure day.
We caught a glimpse of the Jewish Community and were told about the wonderful galleries that we never had time to get to. 
Eventually we had to board a plane and say goodbye for now to our new friends:
As we tour the US in GeeWhiz, our motorhome, we look forward to calling on those whose paths we cross.