Cape Point

February 26

John: We hired a taxicab and a driver today to take us out of Cape Town so that we could see some of the surrounding countryside. Our destination: Cape Point, the southern tip of South Africa, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet. From there, there's nothing until you get to Antarctica--we had to see it.

Our driver, Raj, was recommended to us by some other people on the boat who had taken a similar tour as the one we intended on the first day here. And Raj was good; knowledgeable and thoughtful, he took good care of us. Raj was born in the Cape Town neighborhood that was known as District SIx. Past tense is in order here because District Six was destroyed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the apartheid regime's program of moving black and colored people away from white areas. It probably also mattered that District Six is pretty prime real estate, close to the center of the city and the harbor. Raj and his family were moved to a township about 25 kilometers away; once all 60,000 residents had been relocated in 1974, the entire area was razed to the ground, with the exception of the mosque, synagogue, and church.

The presence of those three houses of worship, though, serves as an index to what Raj described as the lively, cosmopolitan air of the place. Raj has a binder of pictures in his cab that he shared with us as he shares, I guess, with many of his rides, a binder filled with pictures of District Six in the old days. And it does look like an interesting place, with a mixed population (Raj himself would count as "colored" by the South African racial taxonomy, descended from people who came here from India). Most of the land is still vacant--the government was unable to do much with it, and only in the last few years have some homes been built, given to old people who were displaced. We asked Raj if he would ever be interested in returning if he could, and he said, no, it would never be the same as it was.

We proceeded. Raj drove us down the coastline on the Indian Ocean side of the peninsula, past some of the beach towns there. We stopped at a place called Boulder's Beach, where is colony of 3,000 or so African penguins is in residence:

Boulders Beach is in Simons Town, a very charming little town that was built up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the home for the British Navy here; it's now the home for the South African Navy. Which must be a pretty small thing, since Simons Town is teeny--a street along the beach front and a few streets radiating back from it. And, while it's charming, it's also not touristed--it simply is what it is, a small beach-side town with a lot of cute British colonial buildings and a colony of penguins.  It may not stay that way; if you start seeing "Simons Town" tee-shirts and baseball caps, you'll know that its days as a sleepy backwater are over.

Onward to the Cape itself. Here again words will fail. First, the entire area is rich with animal life--we saw baboons just sitting by the side of the road (you're warned to close the windows and lock the doors as you approach the area--they can get aggressive, especially if they think you have food). They're everywhere:

A troop of baboons--that's a big male in the middle

The Cape is a long, thin, rocky peninsula, punctuated at the end by a hill that you can reach by a footpath, or, as we did, via cable-car.  The view from the Cape itself is astonishing. The approach is well-manicured for tourists, and are plenty of other people there, but the landscape feels still raw and untouchedThis is where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, and on a day like this, with clear blue skies, it feels like you can see to Antarctica, here at the apostrophe at the bottom of the world.