Cape Town South Africa just might be one of
my favorite cities in the world. I’d been primed of it’s awesome-ness in
college when one of my best friends spent the summer there interning (I opted
for Jerusalem that summer) and she absolutely fell in love. With my deprivation
of first world culture and living, and the stories that other PCVs brought back,
we’ll just say that I was excited. But still that’s an understatement. We had
plans for every single day and knew there would not be enough meals to indulge
in all the foods we were missing.
Our 24hour bus ride pulled in on Monday
afternoon and immediately we were overwhelmed with the bus station itself
having both a Burger King and a McDonalds. What is this magical fantasy place!
We restrained ourselves, knowing our options for dinner would be even more
elaborate. We made it to our wonderful hostel Zebra Crossing showered, rallied,
and were ready to hit the town. Zebra Crossing was just one street up off of
the main bar drag called Long Street. Long Street kind of has a French
Quarter/Key West feel as all the buildings are 2-3 stories and more than half
of the restaurants have an upstairs bar/balcony or are exclusively upstairs. Our
first stop is a Cuban place. We order frozen margaritas and chicken nachos. Let
me just say, the first of many this upcoming week. We didn’t want to fill up as
we found a Middle Eastern/Indian/Chinese/American place that we definitely
wanted to eat at. Chinese and Indian food are fairly easy to find in Namibia.
Middle Eastern, most specifically shawarma, has been “on its way”. By that I
mean we hear of places (actually one or two) that are planning to open, they
have the shawarma rotating roaster, the site enough to make your drool, but the
place is not open, its not plugged in or they don’t know how to work it. It’s
pretty much been an 18 month tease.
After inhaling the Middle Eastern goodness
that was bestowed upon us the sun was set and it was getting darker so we went
to go find a bar to start our crazy. We find a cool upstairs place. Drink
specials? Oh my goodness. Mixed drinks? Even cooler. PIZZA DEALS ON TUESDAY? I
think I found heaven. We order up our drink specials, find a good table
overlooking the street, ready to have a good night, and we realize the place is
fricken empty. Like there was music, there were lights, there were a few people
but we all thought dang, maybe Mondays are just the travel days for people. We
were sitting there thinking “Well we are planning to climb Table Mountain
tomorrow and we don’t want to do that hung over so I guess after this drink we
can call it quits?” We looked at the clock. It wasn’t even 8pm yet. I guess you
can take the boy out of the village but you can’t take the village out of the
boy. When the sun goes down, we go down.
Table Mountain
Table Mountain is one of the Natural Seven
Wonders of the World and it actually is quite breathtaking. It’s this beautiful
flat top mountain that looms over the whole city. My Tates wanted to climb the
mountain, I said I’d meet them at the top via the trusty cable car. The taxi drops
us off at the cable car station, we look at the trail maps and we part ways.
Depending on where you read, people say the hike can take anywhere from 4-6
hours (hence why I said no thank you) so I watched my Tates walk off knowing I
had pleanty of time to kill. I look through the various gift shops, speak with
the owners, get in line to get my ticket, and meet a nice Australian couple. I
told them how I fell in love with their country when I was younger and that’s
where my wanderlust began. They looked at me and said, what do you mean when
you were younger? You still are young! I was like okay, but I am a teacher you
know!
I got my first taste of tourism in nearly
two years as I waited in line to by my ticket, waited in line to get on the
elevator, waited in line to get my ticket scanned, and waited in line to board
the cable car. I felt like the goats back in Schlip. I wanted to take pictures
but was nervous to pull out my fancy iPhone in such a touristy place. Hello
pickpocketers, I was smarter than that. I would quickly pull out the phone,
snap a pic or two, and quickly return it to the specific zippered pocket in my
purse and hold my hand over the zipper so no one could get to it without my
knowing. It was only then that I realized how silly I was being because half
the people were carrying iPads out in the open and the other half had their
smart phones on a long stick that they would hold in the air for a selfie. Like
you need to take a course in vigilance because you look ridiculous and
vulnerable. I thought to myself, oh my god, this is the world I will be joining
again in 6 months.
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| Lion's Head. Cape Town is on the far right. |
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| View of Cape Town |
I arrive to the top of the mountain and it
is stunning. I cant even think of words to describe it, mostly because my
English has faltered in the past two years. Anyways, it was the most clear
beautiful day to be up on a mountain looking out over a city and ocean below
and other mountains in the distance. I found that there were different walking
trails along the top. The longest one taking 45 minutes. Hell, I got time, I’ll
walk around the top, sit and have serene moments to myself, take a few pictures
(no selfies unless I was sure I was alone. I didn’t want to be judged like I
was judging others), and read every sign there was about the history of the
mountain and the nature on top of it. I begin to walk around, trying to battle
a woman with a stroller following her eager husband and two other small kids as
they run over rocks and another couple who’s wife has a fur coat and high heels
on. Woman you are on a mountain. Just why? I stop trying to see if they will
all get far enough ahead I don’t have to deal with them and I see two tall
white boys, one with a ridiculously red shirt, just barreling up a path. It’s
my two Tates who climbed a mountain in a little over an hour. Like NBD. I
clearly made the good decision to not join them. They literally ran up the
mountain. Thankfully our paths actually crossed when they did because I would
have kept walking, trying to dodge myself among ridiculous people, and probably
would have thought about throwing myself over the edge. Maybe someone would
have seen me and tried to save me by reaching out their selfie stick for me to
grab onto. We could only hope.
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| My two tates coming up the mountain |
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| So many white people, so much expensive technology |
We literally picked the most perfect day to
visit the mountain because the rest of the week the mountain top was concealed
by clouds and fog, so you wouldn’t have been able to see much from the top. So
not only did we pick a clear morning, but when we got to the bottom cable car
station we were able to watch the thick cloud cover roll in off the water,
blanketing the city. It was also coming up over the side of the mountain
covering the road down in a thick fog. It was really cool to watch, a bit
ominous, but we still decided to walk through it back down the rest of the
mountain to our hostel.
With nothing else planned for our day
(except pizza night obvi) we decided to venture on a walking path off the main
winding road. We stumbled into the wealthiest neighborhood I have ever laid
eyes on. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t even gated, but it should have been.
These homes were 4-5 stories above the ground, and built at the base of Table
Mountain. Every time we turned a corner and kept walking we were dumbfounded
and just stopped and stared.
2 for 1 pizza night was as glorious as it
sounds. There were about 12 or 15 of us, we all got our own pizzas and we all
shared in the glory that was a 7USD specialty pizza. It ultimately was a quiet
night as we had our highly anticipated wine tour the next day.
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