It’s been a fabulous experience, and I honestly do hope to return here. You wouldn’t believe how many locals have apologized for their winter–a series of fabulously sunny, cloudless (albeit on the cooler side) days. Of the entire month, we got only three days of rain. Otherwise it was generally either as warm or warmer (and sunnier) than San Francisco’s typical summer days. I can imagine how glorious their summers are here.

In honor of the so-called “Big Five” (African elephant, Cape buffalo, black rhino, lion and leopard), I’ve come up with my own lists of five. Here, as a summary, is my random list of  five things.

Five Best Moments

1. Walking the Fan Walk to Green Point Stadium
2. Getting in the cab at the end of my Table Mountain hike
3. Spotting the lion and holding on to the back of the truck as the guide speeds away and the lion gives chase
4. Cooking a traditional Cape Malay lunch with Gemilah in her home in Bo’Kaap
5. Watching international tourists walk around sporting their flags and national team colors during the World Cup

Honorable mention: listening to the call to prayer from two different mosques at the same time

Five Biggest Surprises

1. The natural beauty
2. The racial integration
3. The utter disregard for pedestrians
4. The effort and attention to security
5. Woolworth’s

Five things I still want to do

1. Whale watching at Hermanus
2. Kruger National Park (Eastern Cape)
3. Climb Lion’s Head
4. Visit the Cango Caves in Southern Cape
5. Afternoon tea at Mount Nelson Hotel

Five best meals

1. Lunch at Bombay Brasserie
2. Steak dinner at Carne
3. Dinner at Five Flies
4. Dinner at Jardine
5. Dinner at Aubergine

Five things I’ll miss the most

1. The people and their almost total lack of snarkiness
2. The changing light on Table Mountain throughout the day
3. The weather (even in winter!)
4. The efficient and clean taxis
5. Free time

Five things they have going for themselves

1. National self-confidence after a superb World Cup
2. Active news media (Cape Town has TWO daily newspapers, but it’s currently under threat of a govt tribunal)
3. A progressive constitution  that’s serious about civil rights
4. A new generation that never knew Apartheid
5. Social and environmental awareness

Five things that need work

1. HIV-AIDS (although South Africa has 0.7% of the global population, it carries 17% of the world’s HIV-AIDS cases)
2. Housing (South African has set itself the target of eradicating informal settlements by 2014)
3. Reliable, cheap, safe public transportation
4. Unemployment (25%)
5. The dessert menus

What I have missed most from home

1. My mom and friends, familiar faces
2. Driving myself
3. Mexican food
4. The rest of my wardrobe
5. Cooking

Five ubiquitous menu items

1. Calamari
2. Greek salad
3. Chocolate molten cake
4. Kingklip
5. Butternut squash

Five things they have that we should

1. Sea salt on every restaurant table (Swag’s suggestion)
2. Virgin Active
3. Origin Coffee (home barista training)
4. Two living icons who represent freedom, fairness and forgiveness (Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu)
5. Legal gay marriage

Now we brace ourselves for 24 hours of flying in coach. See y’all on the flip side!

I finally settled on the Garden Route Game Lodge, about three-and-a-half hours east of Cape Town. The whole package included breakfasts, dinners, lodging, game drives and a driver to and from the lodge.

I knew it would be somewhat a controlled environment—unlike Kruger, which lets you just drive around looking for lions, elephants, etc. There are some pretty amazing videos on YouTube from tourists, including the now-famous “Battle at Kruger.”

Every month, tourists die in Kruger because they (1) get too close, (2) don’t understand or respect basic animal behavior, and (3) get out of their cars for “the shot” and are mauled.

Even more people are eaten each month when they cross the border from Mozambique illegally (but don’t give Arizona and ideas).

The Garden Route drive was magnificent with breathtaking vistas and valleys. Greg got some beautiful shots from the moving vehicle, which I’ll post later.

The lodge is made of a main building with a restaurant and many of the rooms, as well as a group of “chalets.” They’re actually small thatched huts with a veranda. They were quite cozy and comfortable. And the views were fabulous.

There are two game drives a day, one in the early morning and the other at sunset. There are nine seats in the back of a pick-up truck. The lodge property is separated from the animal by a fence that encloses the reserve and also separates natural enemies from each other. They don’t have many of each example of animal, so they can’t afford for “nature to take its course.” In 2006, a rhino did kill one of the elephants on the property and you can tell the staff was deeply affected by the loss.

On our first ride, Greg mentioned that it felt like Jurassic Park as the big metal gate closed behind us. The roads are a bit rough, but the drivers are slow enough that we don’t get bumped around too much.

On our first ride, as we stopped at a clearing to see the springbok, a male ostrich came running right up to the truck. They are not dangerous so long as they don’t kick you. So if you stay in the vehicle you’ll be fine. The guide would try to shoo it away, but it was too curious about us. It’s a bit intimidating to have this huge, dumb bird come right up to you.  The driver started the truck and revved the engine to no avail. And when she slowly started to drive away, it stepped in front of the vehicle and wouldn’t let us pass. Finally, it started to lead us along the road, got bored and eventually went in search of a female ostrich. On later drives this ostrich-in-heat would provide continuous entertainment as it chased around the females and bothered the other animals.

We were able to see a quasi-sample of the big five—buffalo, elephant, lion, leopard and rhino.  Why “quasi”? For example, we saw a white rhino, which is far less dangerous and aggressive than the black rhino. We saw a Cape buffalo, not a true water buffalo. And while we saw cheetahs in pens, they’re not leopards. They’re called the big five because they are the most dangerous animals to hunters on foot. Of these, the buffalo is the most dangerous. It kills more humans than the other four animals combined. This is primarily because their warning signals are not obvious if you don’t know what to look for.

On our last night’s drive, there were only four of us in the back. The other couple was from Cape Town. After a nice sunset drive, we drove into the lion’s area. Although the animals are sequestered into their own areas, these are still huge enough that you have to drive around a while to find the animals, even the elephants (they get 100 hectares, or 247 acres, just to themselves). So we drove around a bit and couldn’t find the lions, until we saw one lioness came out of thicket of bushes along the fence.

Typically our drivers would back into the area where we would see the lions. This would allow for quick getaway, just in case. The three lions (two female, one male) typically hang out together. They are rescued animals from a “canned hunt” park. The Born Free Foundation rescued them from deplorable conditions. So while they would not survive on their own in the true wild, they are actually more dangerous than true wild animals because they are used to humans.

Greg and the other two had spotted at least one of the other lions also in the thicket up along the fence. So our driver backed up the truck closer to the thicket, but a safe distance from where we thought the other lions would be. I kept looking to the other side, having remembered an episode of “Planet Earth” in which lions worked as a team to surround their prey. It was disconcerting to me to be so close to the bushes without a real visual on all the lions. But you figure the guide knows what he’s doing.

So now the driver/guide, the other couple and Greg are all scanning the bushes along the fence in search of the other two lions. I’m standing up in the back. It’s silent. Suddenly, I hear a flutter of birds and I look out of the corner of my eye and one of the female lions comes rushing out of the bushes. I yell, “There’s the lion! At two o’clock!” OK, so you don’t really want the lion to be (1) that close, or (2) in front of you! The lion, of course, heard me and looks over and hunches over (anyone who has ever had a pet cat knows this pose) just as the driver hits the gas…and the lion gave chase. We were bouncing around too hard for me to catch any pictures. We didn’t drive far before the lion gave up (they’re well fed), and we stopped momentarily to catch our breath. We decided to get the heck out of the area, so we drove back out the double gates and stopped to excitedly tell each other our perspectives—where we each were looking, when we first saw the lion, how exciting it was. The driver admitted that was a bit too close for comfort for him.

After that, we drove out to the elephants. These elephants are also rescue animals, used to humans, but were not cooperative in the program that teaches them how to be a ride at a festival (good for them!). They were being put back into the barn for the night and our drive took us in there to help out with the feeding of the male (the female is a grouch). It was totally wild to pick up a couple handfuls of pellets and dump them into the end of the elephant’s trunk!

After all our excitement, it was time to head back to the lodge for dinner and a quiet evening in our chalet.

The next morning we packed up, had breakfast, and took another scenic drive back to Cape Town with our hippie driver.

She picked me up at 7:45 a.m. and a young couple was already in the car with her. They were from London, just arrived yesterday and here on their honeymoon. The guide is named Margaret, a petite woman with a strong handshake. I could tell she did a quick initial assessment of my fitness and my attire, to make sure I was capable and meant business.

In my attempt to pack very light, I’d made the very difficult decision not to bring my hiking boots, figuring most any hike I attempted could be serviced by my sneakers that I wear to the gym.

After my pick-up we got another woman, an “African-American” woman from South Carolina.

The hike was described like this: start at Kirschenbosch Botanical Gardens, up Skeleton Gorge to Macleans Beacon (the highest point on Table Mountain) then down the front edge of the mountain and down the front face of it. Most online descriptions I read of these hikes simply say you need to be reasonably fit. I felt ready.

I’ve been battling a cold for a week, which has now parked itself in my nasal passages and the top of my lungs. So I hadn’t worked out this week and I knew that my lung capacity was going to be tested.

So off we go…start at the Gardens, up a paved road to the trailhead. It was similar to the hill climb up to our house in San Francisco, so it was a pretty straightforward warm-up. The honeymooners and I kept up fine. The other woman was out of breath.

Then our guide took her aside and had a very honest and candid discussion. “I don’t think this is for you. This is barely a warm-up for what’s ahead.” They had a bit of a discussion, and the woman was sent on her own back into the gardens to enjoy a more leisurely stroll and catch a cab back to her hotel.

Wow. We hadn’t even started the trip and already one person had been dismissed. I knew our guide meant business. I also know that our safety is paramount and she can’t risk the whole team for someone who simply is not up for it.

So now I was off to prove how fit I was, not to anyone else but to myself. I’ve worked out really hard for the last six months, both for general fitness but also for the ascent of Pico in the Azores.

To compare, Table Mountain is 1,084 meters (3,558 feet) elevation; Pico is 2,351 meters (7,713 feet).

The sign at the trailhead reads (I’ve seen this online but didn’t stop to read it as we forged ahead into the trail):

CAUTION

This path takes you up Table Mountain via Skeleton Gorge. Please take note that it is a DIFFICULT and POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS climb, particularly in wet weather. Sections of the path are:

• Very steep with ladders and ropes in places
• Very slippery when wet, and dangerous after heavy rain.

And in cloudy conditions it is easy to lose your way and get into trouble.

Please do not continue up this path in very wet or cloudy weather, or if you are not in good health and reasonably fit, or without a qualified guide or a good map, or without a cellphone.

So we head up Skeleton Gorge. There is an exercise I do in the gym whereby I hold two dumbbells and step up and down on a bench about one and a half feet high. I do that 24 times (about), rest, then do it again. This hike was basically that, but with no breaks between sets and about 200 repetitions. My legs were burning. My lungs were burning. And I got dizzy. I had brought plenty of water, but I was starting to fear whether I’d make it. The dizziness, I think, was an after-affect of the cold and clearly a sign of dehydration. I had brought a packet of a powder they use here called “Re-Hydrate” and poured it into my water bottle. It included electrolytes and other stuff. That, I think, made the difference between making it and not. My dizziness started to clear up and didn’t occur any more after that.

But I was still completely winded and trailing the very-fast guide and honeymooners. There was hardly time to snap off a few pictures, so my photos are limited and cursory.

This was frustrating to me. Although I’ve been working hard, my cardiovascular endurance is still crap. This particularly trail is called the Smuts Track, named for a famous hiker who did this well into his 70s. Arrg.

And then we hit the ladders. That’s right. There are points that are so steep that they have built ladders (about three of them) to navigate up the steep ravine. OK. Time to face fear of heights.

The ladder climb was fine. And then we were in front of a stream-cum-waterfall. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the trail. Now we had to climb up some serious boulders. Here is where I felt my strength came in—my weight training made it fairly easy for me to lift myself up with upper body strength; my balance training gave me ankle strength and confidence that I wasn’t going to slip. I still wish I’d brought my hiking boots, but the sneakers held up well enough.

We took Skeleton Gorge to Macleans Beacon, the official highest point on Table Mountain. You’d think we’d be done. But OH NO.  We still had the flat part of the mountain to reach. By now the winds had kicked in to the point that it was hard to stand up and, by the way, this part of the hike was literally along the edge of the cliff. The good news was the wind was blowing us against the mountain so the likelihood of getting knocked OFF the mountain was slim. Nonetheless, this was the more terrifying part of the hike. The guide said to stick close together (that was for me, obviously, since I was the one lagging behind). And we finally made it to the flat part of the mountain.

We stopped at an area that was a bit sheltered to eat snacks and drink water. Then, from behind the rock, comes along a guy JOGGING…we had no idea where he’d come from, but he started down the path we were about to take. Needless to say, he had the most amazing legs I’d ever seen on a guy close-up. We all looked at each other stunned.

The views, when we occasionally stopped to enjoy them, were breathtaking.

It was so windy that the cable car was not running. So we’d have to hike down. We took Platteklip Gorge, about 800 rock steps going down.

I sadly don’t have great pictures, because it was not a leisurely stroll, but a hustle to do this in five hours. I’m not sure what time we actually started, but it was probably no later than 9 a.m., and we came down to a road where a pre-arranged taxi waited for us around 2:30 p.m. I’d have been willing to make this a full-day (8 hour) hike so we could take more breaks and more pictures. But overall, I have a great sense of accomplishment that I was able to keep up. And I also know some of the things I have to work on for the Pico ascent!

The closest one can get to real local cuisine is the food of the Malay, a conglomeration of former slave cultures–Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Java, Sri Lanka and Madagascar. These were slaves who were brought here to work for the Dutch East India Company.

I hadn’t had much luck until Saturday when our Winelands tour guide arranged for a class in Bo’Kaap, or Malay Quarter. When I arrived at the bright green house, Gamidah was there to greet me. It turns out it was to be a 1:1 cooking class!

We chatted and cooked together and then had lunch together. She was delightful. I told her how much I enjoyed hearing the call to prayer from the mosques in this neighborhood, and we stood at her kitchen door listening at 1 p.m. to the lulling singing from two different mosques. She also translated it for me.

She taught me to make Malay chicken curry, samoosas, roti and sambal. She gave me the printed recipes and directed me across the street from her home to a little market where I bought up a bunch of ground spices. The good thing is that I can buy most of what she had at home (coriander, cayenne pepper, fennel, etc.) But I bought different versions of garam masala. Oddly, they had one called “mother in law masala” and “father in law masala.”  I have no idea why. I avoided buying the curry leaves, as the good paranoid people at customs might not allow me to bring in a plant. I’ll have to search that out at home.

Saturday we went to the Winelands, visiting Paarl, Franschhoek and Stollenbosch. It was a group tour done by a company that specializes in wine tours. It turns out it was just the two of us, and a woman from Dublin. So it was pretty private.

Sunday (today) we went with another driver/tour guide for a drive down one side of the peninsula all the way to Cape Point (the southern most part of Africa…the last bit of land before Antarctica) and back up the other side of the peninsula.

With wine country and coastline as the focus of our two days, there is a temptation to compare it to California. There are many similarities, but both trips were uniquely African.

Wine Tasting

Despite being called “New World” for winemaking, winemaking has been around South Africa for 300 years. There is a unique varietal here called Pinotage, a cross breed of the Pinot Noir and Cinsaut (aka, Hermitage) grapes. Our early experiences with Pinotage were with high tannins and some harsher flavors.

But the wines we experienced in our day of wine tasting were far from that. We visited four wineries. And after 20 tastes of wine throughout the day, I was certainly relieved that we had someone else driving!

I won’t go into details about the wines we drank—what a bore, particularly when none of these exports to the US. But I will say this: we have been to a few wine regions of the world (California, Italy, Portugal). Each has its own unique landscape, but it always feels like wine country. This is even more unique. It feels wilder. The soaring, sheer mountains, boulders and deep valleys create a dramatic background to the vineyards and estates.

We ended up buying three bottles at the various estates for drinking while we are still here in Cape Town. We even managed to snag a 2001 Cabernet for R22 (that’s $3US. The local version of two-buck chuck? We’ll let you know!)

We had lunch at Haute Cabriere, a sparking wine producer of note. I had braised rabbit with pasta, which was flavorful and filling.

Before lunch the notorious owner’s wife gave us a tour. She was quite a character in her own right, and told great stories about how they developed this winery. She even opened the bottles the old-fashioned way—with a sword.

I’ve been on champagne cave tours before, but on this one I learned quite a bit not just about how it’s made but also the historical stories about it. Among them:

• When ordering oak barrels from France, you get a choice of oak forests from which the barrels are made. They are priced differently depending on the quality and characteristics of the wood. In other words, even the barrels have their own terroir.

• The great Vivue Cloquet was the widow of a winemaker and she was the one who thought to remove the yeast left in the bottle by getting it to fall to the top of the neck behind the cork.

Cape Point Tour

We were blessed with spectacular weather this weekend. I have joked that I’ll take a Cape Town winter over a San Francisco summer.

Our driver Yaseem picked us up at nine in the morning and took us through a short tour of downtown so Greg could see Bo’Kaap (meaning “higher cape”), the predominantly Muslim neighborhood, also called the Malay Quarter. I’d already walked through there, but it was good for Greg to see the brightly colored homes and cobblestone streets.

We drove down the Atlantic Seaboard through Camp’s Bay, Clifton, and Hout Bay. Then cut across the Eastern (False Bay) side of the peninsula for a drive through several cute little coastal towns—Fish Hoek, Simon’s Town, etc., all the way down to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope (named by a Portuguese explorer, Bartolemeu Dias).

Click here for a map.

The dramatic cliffs soar into the skies from the ocean, creating some of the most picturesque coastal drives in the world. We often take drives through Big Sur and have enjoyed drives down the Amalfi Coast, but this can stand among the best. But they are all unique. California boasts the big redwoods and forests, and Amalfi has historic buildings. But Cape Town has almost other-worldly panoramas.

Perhaps the most dramatic event was when we were scoping out an area for a picnic. I was warned that the baboons were very aggressive and could open car doors, etc. I was standing there with a bag full of sandwiches, our driver several meters away on his cell phone. Greg was taking pictures. The next thing I know, the driver is running as fast as he could toward the car. I had thought he’d forgotten to put on his emergency brakes and the car was rolling. He quickly tossed his bag into the car and locked it. The next thing I noticed, a mama baboon and her baby came up on a boulder right behind me. Someone shouted, “She’s after your bag!” So I got it into the car, and we started this baboon down. Greg took some great close-up shots! I was too stunned to act quickly.

We ate our lunch a little ways down, but suddenly I kept looking over my shoulder every couple minutes!

Fort Knox

The South Africans like their security, though. Everything has alarms. Most homes and businesses sport some kind of security company plaque with the words “armed response.” Most people live behind stone or iron gates with electric fencing or barbed wire.

Just to get into this apartment, we have to go through a locked gate into a small courtyard, unlock an iron gate at our front door, disarm the alarm with a remote, then enter the house. We do the whole thing in reverse whenever we leave.

While that certainly adds to a sense of security when I’m here alone—this is a pretty quiet side street—it also give me a sense of being imprisoned. There are locked bars on all the windows and even the little courtyard has locked iron bars around it.

Food and Cooking

My general philosophy is that you don’t really a know a place until you have eaten among the locals and have shopped for groceries. My first order of business once we settled in here was to take a complete inventory of the kitchen supplies and equipment. It’s pretty thin. I also have low hopes for the knives, seriously debating whether I should buy a sharpening steel.

It’s obvious that no one who stays here actually cooks any food, so while I expect to cook a little, it won’t be a big priority.

There is a shopping center very near here that has a Woolworth’s, which has no relationship to what we know in the States. Here Woolworths are mostly food stores, similar to a Trader Joe’s in that all the food is packaged, even the fresh stuff. I bought the fixings for making chicken soup—a much-needed simple respite from the two weeks of eating rich meals for dinner every night. I couldn’t even buy fresh garlic—it comes already minced. Most of the vegetables come already chopped in a plastic (compostable, apparently) bag.

For breakfast I picked up meusli, yogurt, milk, bananas, English muffins and jam. That should keep me pretty happy in the morning. There is no coffee set-up…no coffee pot, no filter, no French press, nothing. So we’re going out for coffee in the morning. But at least I won’t be indulging in pastries every morning—delicious but wrecking havoc on my diet.

How you pay for electricity is another interesting concept here. You prepay, then you get a code that you punch into your electric box and that gives you a certain amount of electricity. So you have to keep an eye on the electric box so you can replenish your account before it gets too low and the lights go out.

There’s a certain rhythm here now, and I’m starting to equate certain sounds with this town:

1. The loud ducks that fly overhead toward the Company’s Gardens in the morning.

2. The Muslim call to prayer from the Malay Quarter. It’s such a beautiful, soothing sound.

3. The honking and whistling from the notorious shared taxi drivers and conductors. With no public buses, these enterprising guys in vans drive around picking people up and taking them to their destinations. They’re a bit renegade and if you look lost they’ll pull up next to you offering a ride. They’re generally pretty safe, but seem to be used a lot by people who live in the townships, so I’m avoiding them–lest I end up in a part of town I’d best avoid. Greg and I took one from Table Mountain our first weekend here and it was a pretty wild ride–very colorful driver, too.

4. The noon gun–similar to the air raid signal in San Francisco. The sound of a cannon every day at noon can be startling if you don’t know what it’s for. I prefer the church bells of Italy to mark my time.

The last few days we’ve spent time visiting landmarks that demonstrate the worst that humans can do, and the triumph of the human spirit in spite of evil. The highlights:

1. Imizamo Yethu township
2. Robben Island
3. District Six Museum
4. The Slave Lodge

The common thread here, of course, is Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “segregation.” This was the white ruling party’s government policy, in force starting in 1948, that determined where you could live, work and be buried depending on your skin color. It determined where children went to school. Sex “across the color bar” was punishable b imprisonment. Loss of land was among the system’s most terrible inflictions.

In 1952, the Natives Act required all black people over 16 to carry a pass book (a permit to work in the “white area”) at all times, and present it to police on demand.

Hello, Arizona.

Slave Lodge

Built by the Dutch Indian Trade Company, this is one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town. The slaves here were not part of the Atlantic slave trade to the New World. Instead, slaves were brought here from places like India and Indonesia. But the stories were the same: families torn apart, treated like property, etc.

Townships

During the Apartheid era, the South African government did not want black people to settle permanently in Cape Town. Blacks were evicted from properties that were in areas designated as “white only” and forced to move into townships. Legislation that enabled the Apartheid government to do this included the Group Areas Act.

Men were needed for labor in the white city of Cape Town and therefore allowed into the city during working hours. Townships were merely set up as dormitories for the laborers.

Women were banned from seeking employment in the city and wives could not join their husbands. However, Apartheid failed to prevent the influx of job-seekers and families, and when no legal accommodation could be found, shacks were erected.

Imizamo Yethu was established in the early 1990s as an area where mainly black people were allowed by the authorities to build homes known as ‘shacks’ or temporary shelters. Many of the black residents of Hout Bay could not afford, and by law were not allowed to buy property or homes in Hout Bay and had no choice but to look for vacant land on which their temporary homes were built. This was done in many cases without permission and lead to much unhappiness and aggravation with their white fellow residents. In 1989 the local government had to intervene and a piece of property was developed with basic services (roads, water and sewerage) on which black residents were allowed to build their temporary shelters and named it: Imizamo Yethu meaning “our combined effort” in Xhosa.

The residents of Imizamo Yethu comprise mainly of Xhosa speaking people originating from the Transkei in the Eastern Cape where many of their family members still reside.

I was mentally prepared for this, but was still taken aback when I got close to see the living conditions in the shantytown. Many of the residents live in small corrugated iron shacks measuring about 9ft x 9ft. At least now all the of them have running water and electricity. The main road is paved, but some of the side roads are pretty bashed up and treacherous.

It was not until the recent involvement of an Irish businessman, Niall Mellon, which resulted in more than three hundred brand new, high quality homes of brick being built with promises of many more.

If you have never been in a place like this, the scenery can still be shocking and depressing. It was strange to walk through and take pictures of people’s poverty, even though the tour fee goes directly to support the local community. I can’t imagine in the U.S. we would implement a “ghetto” tour.

There are several township tours you can take, and I imagine this one was selected because you can see progress with some solid homes built and real sense of community.

District Six

One of those communities deemed a “white only” area is the famed District Six, a primarily Muslim but very diverse working class neighborhood in the heart of Cape Town. In the 1970s, 60,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes to make room for white people.

International pressure made the re-building of the area difficult, so it was left mostly vacant. Even today there is a huge swath of empty lots, filled with weeds. Locals want to keep it this way as a memorial to those who lost their homes.

The museum is more a memorial to those who lost their homes. There is no real timeline, but rather a collection of memories and momentos from people who lived there. Still, it’s a moving exhibit.

Robben Island

Robben Island was established as a prison by the Dutch in the 1600s. It has also been a leprosy colony and a training ground for soldiers in World War II. But it’s mostly known as the maximum-security prison used to banish political prisoners in the fight against Apartheid. The most famous of these prisoners is, of course, Nelson Mandela. He was there for 18 years. But there were plenty of other political prisoners held there, including the current president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma.

Now it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Saturday we’d booked a ferry trip and tour, but it was rainy and the water was too rough so they canceled trips. Sunday was picture perfect. As we waited at the dock, we also saw a couple whales frolicking! It was amazing how close the came to the harbor!

Whale in the harbor

After that excitement we headed out. We were SO glad to have taken our Dramamine. The long rolling waves were pretty dramatic for those of us who aren’t out on the water very often.

We took a bus tour of the highlights and then a brief walking tour by a former political prisoner. What I liked about the tour was that there was not a specific focus on just Nelson Mandela. Granted, his cell is the only “staged” cell and everyone (including myself) stops to snap off a few pictures. But the lectures during the tour focus on the bigger stories.

What is interesting about all this “history” is that it is so alive, so fresh in people’s minds. Yet it seems so far away. You walk around and just can’t imagine that it’s been only since 1994 when President Mandela unified the country when he was elected president. People use the word “transformation” when they talk about South Africa. It’s not an exxageration.

Nelson Mandela's cell at Robben Island

Robben Island Prison Yard