Having fallen into bed exhausted last night, we were grateful not to have to get up until around 7 AM. One of the latest morning times we have experienced since we’ve gotten to South Africa.
We gathered our things together for a busy sightseeing day in Cape Town. Our hotel has a lovely breakfast buffet, and we filled our tummies, grabbing a little leftovers in our backpack for later and caught a cab to go down to the waterfront. We had a very nice discussion with our cab driver, who is also a tour guide. He gave us recommendations of things we should see, most of which we had already booked, so Patti was feeling pretty proud about that. He would have been happy to arrange other activities, but we were already set for the next several days.
We were dropped off at the waterfront for our tour of the morning going to Robben‘s Island, the place where Nelson Mandela and many many other political prisoners were held captive for many years. There was a fairly quick moving line to get us on board the boat and we congratulated ourselves at arriving in perfect time to get a nice seat on the upper deck. The trip out to the island was around a half an hour, and it was a very bright sunny blue sky day. So sunny we wish we had brought our hiking hats along, but at least had sunglasses.
The tour itself was very powerful. The first part of the tour was a bus ride to see where the prisoners had to mine rock using picks and shovels. Our tour guide, Kennte, a very knowledgeable young man who set the stage for the later parts of our visit. After the mine, we stopped to see the isolated African Penguin colony on the island. It was strange to know we were visiting a prison when Cape Town and Table Mountain were in plain sight across eight miles of very cold water. No political prisoner ever escaped from this island.
Then we returned to the front of the actual prison where we met, Themba, our tour guide who was a former political prisoner. He mixed in his personal experiences being a political prisoner there with more general facts. We had the opportunity to see a sample of a room where 40 prisoners had been held. Next was the block of cells for those being held in solitary confinement. This included seeing the cell where Nelson Mandela had been held captive for 17 years. He also was inprisoned for an additional 10 years held elsewhere. It was a very sobering and meaningful experience. All the more so to know if there was somebody who could have justified being really embittered and forever angry, it was Nelson Mandela. Instead, he was able to find the power within to come out the other side, having seen the humanity of his captors, and having negotiated his release without ever giving up the rightness of his cause.
Those who survived imprisonment on the island referred to it later as an intensive political training time. Political leaders from all over South Africa were forced into the same space and every night there were political discussions and debates. These leaders were much more aligned when they were finally freed.
Following a tour in Robben's Island, we were back on the boat and landed in the waterfront area. We looked around a little bit there as a place full of shops and museums. Cape Town is quite a beautiful city. It’s about the waterfront and the amazing Table Mountain that overlooks everything.
We found the place that you could catch the hop-on hop-off the bus with the ticket that came along with our tour. We road it around a chunk of the city, listening to commentary and noting the various sites. Hop-on hop-off buses are sort of a cheap person’s tour of a place and we have enjoyed those as orientation to several cities in our travels.
But, our goal was to get to the cable car going up to the top of Table Mountain. We arrived at about 2 o’clock and went up on this beautiful beautiful day. Our taxi driver had told us some days it is so windy and cloudy that they close the cable cars down, but not today. We enjoyed the beautiful view of the city as we went up and at the top it was spectacular looking over this amazing place. We are nearly at he most southern tip of South Africa. There were hiking paths, a store and restaurants and a number of things at the top of the mountain. But, what we were most interested in was the view which we saw.
As in so many National Parks, as soon as you got not far from the parking lots, the crowds thinned out considerably. We spent a couple of hours wandering, chatting with people, exchanging photos with some photographers, and just noticing what a beautiful place this was. We ran into several of the folks who are on our tour. So funny to be so far away form home, and to see people we knew.
As the afternoon was going by and we’re getting ready for sunset at 5:30, it was time to go down the mountain. We caught the next to the last half-on hop-off the bus and the route included a long stretch along the Atlantic coast..
Although there were probably lots of other interesting places to eat dinner, we were happy to just grab some food at our hotel very satisfying.
