Few cities invoke the kind of epiphany you experience at the height of a major life-turning event. As you head on down to the tip of the earth, an ocean away from the barren land of Antarctica, you expect everything that is stereotypically African. The journey into the wild, the wraps on the head, the presence of an ethnic group and its ways. What you don’t expect is the prominence of an atypical type of grandeur, one that has nothing to do with manmade success.
At first, you may well be overwhelmed with the scaling of the landscape. Mountains and motorways give the multi-ethnic city of Cape Town a vastness in dimension, making it impossible to get around on foot unlike most popular tourist destinations.
Indeed, the pervasive presence of mountains and water make it all a little impersonal, a little unfathomable, and that invokes my apathy for a good few hours. Alas, you’ve lost your European comfort zone of cobbled alleyways and your map at hand (not that Cape Town does not have a European element), and that loss of control can prove a little unsettling.
Yet it doesn’t take long for the unfathomable to grow on you. The sheer magnificence of the oceans and the mountains forces you to take your place. This is where the Atlantic Ocean, spanning the Americas, Western Europe and the entire West African coast, meets with an Indian Ocean that fills the space between the Arabian Gulf, India, Australia and the better half of the African east coast. Alas, you have one city engulfed in two oceans, seen from the horn of the peninsula.
The “Cape of Good Hope” has had numerous hits online, being credited with a visible line separating the Atlantic and Indian oceans that Muslims claim is the explanation of a Qur’anic verse, though as we stood at the peak, we noticed only a faint scatter of synchronized marks that may or may not have marked a mystical end to the two oceans.
On the western side of the peninsula, the Atlantic waves move with an intensity that made it impossible to swim in the early days of a November spring. Yet a short drive to the other side of the peninsula saw a calmness prevail in the waves of a subdued Indian Ocean. Much to our delight and notwithstanding the cold remnants of a mid-year winter season, we managed to tick swimming off our list, for it seemed all too ironic to have set eyes on an unprecedented amount of sea without getting a load of it.
Every mountain dotting the landscape has a physical presence so imposing that each has a name akin to its shape. The Lion’s Head lies east of Table Mountain, recently confirmed as one of the world’s New Seven Wonders of Nature. The Twelve Apostles, a neat synchrony of mountain heads, overlook the Atlantic-sided Clifton Beach and Camps Bay. It is this type of physical charisma that gives this impeccably clean coastal city a dimension unrivalled by even the most scenic of seasides.
A haven often sacrificed for the more obvious adventures of Cape Town is its national botanical garden. Indeed, almost everyone I know who has made it to this city had neither visited nor had even heard of Kirstenbosch. Seemingly, it is not an excursion of choice since “garden” screams elderly, mundane and docile (that is until you see its photos, of course). Having experienced a modest but refreshing botanic garden in Malaysia, I sensed Kirstenbosch would offer something spectacular, and behold, it did.
Confining Kirstenbosch to any sort of label, garden or otherwise, does it no justice. It may well be described as a diverse wildlife reserve against a backdrop of natural grandeur. Yet another enormous mountain towers over a landscape of green, serene, bird-chirping splendor, reminding us of a gigantic force, of the big picture, of our place in the general scheme of things.
To further lament the big picture, a short boat ride from Hout’s Bay found us in the midst of vehement, refreshing turquoise Atlantic waves that engulf a little island where hundreds of seals fight for space in refuge from great white sharks. Such a raw scene from the forefront of nature’s elicit food chain had me marveling at my triumph at having witnessed a scene akin to the footage of Sir David Attenborough’s ‘The Blue Planet’. It was in essence a sea safari, which proved much more fruitful and gratifying than the land safari (though yes, Africa does scream safari, the season is tantamount to the success of this costly endeavor).
Unwilling to succumb to the perils of tourism, we refrained from paying a visit to the infamous Robyn Island where Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s former president and anti-racism hero was held captive, since we’d been told by the natives that the prison cell where he resided for many years had been refurbished beyond recognition of its original, primitive state.
It is hard to believe that this is the very same country where an intricate racist system prevailed for almost a half a century during the post-war, “enlightened” era of the last millennium. The Apartheid state saw white supremacy rule the horizon in spite of centuries of cohabitation between native Indians, Indonesians, Dutch, British, Africans and other ethnic groups. The ghosts of this regime are hardly visible as we walk through the streets, as if it never was. As we reach Cape Town’s City Hall, I find a congregation of African natives in the square that was once overlooked by Mandela as he gave his first public speech after his release from prison. With a symbol of freedom towering over them, a scene of historic and physical superiority manifested before our very eyes.
Cape Town’s beginnings as a multi-ethnic hub go back centuries into the story of necessity. The coastal peninsula was a major port of trade in the 17th century and a stopping point for boats making a U-shaped trajectory around the African continent to the Indian bay. Colonized by the Dutch, Cape Town was briefly ruled by Britain before being returned to Dutch sovereignty. Where the “non-white” constituency — Asian, Far Eastern or black — accounts for roughly 80 percent of the total population of Cape Town, the "Afrikaners" (Dutch, French and German descendants) and Anglo-Africans now coexist with their majoritarian counterparts in an impressive display of harmony.
In what remained of our African adventure, it seemed almost ludicrous to leave without spotting a popular inhabitant of the oceans, the whale. Having been told that whales were popular at the end of the winter season and having failed to spot any from the many Capetonian vantage points, we resorted to semi-drastic but fruitful measures. An hour-and-a-half’s drive east of Cape Town along the coast of the Indian Ocean brought us to a town called Hermanus. This unimposing little retreat is the coast’s foremost whale-watching spot. Visitors and inhabitants sit on vast stretches of coastal rock watching southern right whales pass by matter-of-factly. Others kayak within the same radius of the enormous creatures. This, quite simply, was one of the normalcies of their day. Adamant that we’d see different types of whales in the adventurous destination this was, we took a boat out to sea expecting a spectacular show of nature. Much to our disappointment, we were to spot the same family of whales that ended up gliding along the coast. Alas, picnicking on the rock as our fellow mammalian comrades passed us by would have proved more cost-effective and time-efficient (not to mention less nauseating).
Naturally, seafood is not a delicacy in this haven of ocean. The modern V&A Waterfront, an agglomerate of shops and eateries that boasts an almost surreal view of Table Mountain and other surrounding natural monuments, offers fish as its niche. Like all other things in Cape Town, this provided a refreshing break from the normalcies of our life in the land above and we could not get enough. Then again, it would be futile to assume that one can get enough of anything in this enchanting, faraway land.
I once read that only Rio Di Janeiro and Sydney can rival Cape Town in its landscape. Indeed, you can travel to virtually anywhere to find yourself in an aesthetically pleasing setting. Yet when you think Cape Town, you have to think bigger-than-life. You have to think mountains, whales, oceans and civilizations. This is where Atlantic meets Indian, where East meets West, where a rare historical struggle juxtaposes an unrivaled landscape to form a city that is unique in every sense of the word. Want perspective? Head on down to where it all began.
The South African perspective
The South African perspective
