While my crew mates took off for a three day tour north and east of here. I took the opportunity to get some quiet time, and slow down the cash flow. It was a peaceful change. I did get out to one of the mega malls that seem to infest the outskirts of too many large cities; harbingers of the extinction of a city's individuality. The exterior is somewhere between Disney and any Florida Mall. The interior is the depressingly familiar mashup that leaves you thinking you must have walked onto the set of The Truman Show.
(This is a bit of a rewrite of a paragraph. In the prior blog) Being a tourist city there is the usual open topped, hop on / hop off, double decker, big red London Bus. It is an easy, comfortable and at $15 (£12) a reasonable way to get the lay of the land. The long route circumnavigates Table Mountain leaving the city via District Six, (in the 1970's the coloured population was forcibly removed and area was razed), passing the remnants of Cecil Rhodes' estate, past the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, along the edge of the Constantia vineyards, past the black township of Imizamo Yethu, euphemistically dubbed an Informal Settlement by officialdom (33,000 people stuffed into 140 acres without water and sewers). The furthest point out is Hout Bay. Looking across the bay's white sand beach to the surrounding hills that run to Chapman's Peak it looks lightly developed and pretty as a picture. You would never guess that Cape Town lay just a dozen miles away over Constantia Nek. The run back to Cape Town along the narrow road that clings uneasily to the high cliffs that edge the coast and into the suburbs, a term that creates entirely the wrong impression. Llandudno is effectively a private enclave, Camps Bay is very coastal California, Clifton, Bantry Bay and Green Point lead the way into the downtown.
The more time we spend here, the more people we meet and the more interesting Cape Town becomes.
Nora's dad has a buddy from his college days in North Carolina who has a strong reputation as a painter. He keeps a studio in the Woodstock district. That night we all found ourselves in a happening restaurant on Kloof street; a fancy dinner for the price of lunch in the US. The wine was not a steal, but was excellent. A welcome change from some of our recent viniculture ventures.
A friend of mine married a coloured woman from Cape Town which resulted in a two excellent lunches. One with his mother in law and very striking sister in law at the resolutely white Chapman's Hotel overlooking Hout Bay. The looks were worth the price of lunch. The following day we went to his mother in law's home in The Flats part of Cape Town. This is where the apartheid government relocated the non white population of Cape Town's District Six prior to its destruction. Her stories were heartbreaking, appalling and calmly told without resentment. The story of post apartheid South Africa, the reconciliation without a bloodbath, continues to test ones credulity. If written as fiction, it would be dismissed as hopelessly naïve. Just thinking about it now leaves me unable to continue writing.
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