I don’t know where to start. After 2 days, I feel that we hit most of the high spots, yet have barely scratched the surface.
Our stylish little inn, called Cedric’s Lodge, is in the renovated old Malay Quarter where freed slaves had built their tiny huts outside the city walls. Restricted from bright colours when in servitude, they went wild when freed and historical accuracy now dictates that house sports a vivid paint job. On a quiet dead end street, the inn is only steps from some of the nicest little restaurants and shops in a quaint historic context. Yet we are only steps from the city centre and the touristy V&A Waterfront district.
Through a combination of an easy afternoon walk and a ticket on the convenient ‘hop on hop off’ double decker bus (a service offered in most tourist oriented cities), we hit many of the city’s ‘must do’ sights.
Long Street has some of the flavour of the French Quarter in New Orleans. The main shopping street, it is lined with wrought iron Victorian balconies and carved stone commercial facades proudly sporting their late-19th century construction dates. A short block away is the Greenmarket Square, defined by some lovely deco towers and bland ‘70s office buildings and given over to crafts most days. Beyond that, the green swatch of the Company Gardens, created by the Dutch East Indies Company to grow vegetables to provision its passing trading ships now houses hundreds of unique plants from around the world.
This is where you’d find a succinct resume of the Cape Colony’s history in architecture – the
Slave Lodge where the Company kept 1,000 of its slaves at a time, the impressive red-brick and stucco columned Legislative building, the beautiful Dutch Colonial National Gallery (right) and beside it, the impressive Great Synagogue. The latter is still used every day by a proud, progressive Orthodox congregation that numbers over 1,000. It’s also home to the South African Jewish Museum and Holocaust Centre.
The Museum documents the history of a community that played a central role in the economic and political development of the country. We learned for example, that many of the early white anti-Apartheid activists were Jewish and watched a warm video message from Nelson Mandela.
The Holocaust Centre tells a vivid and effective story of how another policy of “apart-ness” led to mass murder in Europe , using the stories of survivors who settled in South Africa. The parallel with Apartheid is not accidental and is meant to sensitize future generations to the dangers of intolerance.
A few blocks away, we slipped into the District Six museum to learn how an entire sector of the city, a ‘messy’ melange of recent arrivals, different races and all religions, was displaced and bulldozed when the zone was declared a ‘whites only’ area. The clearing done, a public outcry prevented much of the planned re- and the blocks surrounding the museum remain an open wasteland of grass and weeds today, a sad memorial to the harsh impact of racial policy.
The bus tour was a welcome opportunity to sit and relax, in a somewhat cold and blustery Cape spring, and watch the natural beauty of the city’s environs whiz by. The Kloot Nek Road along the paws of “Lion’s Head”, the Table Mountain Road up to the base of the cable car – with a magnificent vista over the city and Table Bay, and Camp Bay Drive, down the backside of Table
Mountain and along the beaches. This is the South Atlantic and the water is perennially too cold to swim, but the cliff-side homes are magnificent and so are their views over the white sand beaches and pounding surf.
We ended our brief visit to the newly gentrified Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (still don’t know how Alfred bumped Albert?!) for a dinner of the freshest Calamari, fish and chips I’ve ever tasted, sitting on a picnic table over the water, while the sunset behind Signal Hill (or the Lion’s Rump) paints the clouds overhead a vivid pink and the grey clouds that clothe Table Mountain slip over the edge and into the city.
What did we miss? The sobering visit to Robbins Island where Nelson Mandela was held for over 2 decades, was out of reach because tickets on the ferry are booked weeks in advance, and the high springtime winds kept the Table Mountain Cable car grounded. And what of the residents of Capetown? Our very superficial interactions with them have been full of warm smiles and eye-contact – a sense that genuine connections can be there, if we give it some time.
With only the surface scratched, we’ll clearly need to return some day.
Our stylish little inn, called Cedric’s Lodge, is in the renovated old Malay Quarter where freed slaves had built their tiny huts outside the city walls. Restricted from bright colours when in servitude, they went wild when freed and historical accuracy now dictates that house sports a vivid paint job. On a quiet dead end street, the inn is only steps from some of the nicest little restaurants and shops in a quaint historic context. Yet we are only steps from the city centre and the touristy V&A Waterfront district.
Through a combination of an easy afternoon walk and a ticket on the convenient ‘hop on hop off’ double decker bus (a service offered in most tourist oriented cities), we hit many of the city’s ‘must do’ sights.
Long Street has some of the flavour of the French Quarter in New Orleans. The main shopping street, it is lined with wrought iron Victorian balconies and carved stone commercial facades proudly sporting their late-19th century construction dates. A short block away is the Greenmarket Square, defined by some lovely deco towers and bland ‘70s office buildings and given over to crafts most days. Beyond that, the green swatch of the Company Gardens, created by the Dutch East Indies Company to grow vegetables to provision its passing trading ships now houses hundreds of unique plants from around the world.
This is where you’d find a succinct resume of the Cape Colony’s history in architecture – the
Slave Lodge where the Company kept 1,000 of its slaves at a time, the impressive red-brick and stucco columned Legislative building, the beautiful Dutch Colonial National Gallery (right) and beside it, the impressive Great Synagogue. The latter is still used every day by a proud, progressive Orthodox congregation that numbers over 1,000. It’s also home to the South African Jewish Museum and Holocaust Centre.The Museum documents the history of a community that played a central role in the economic and political development of the country. We learned for example, that many of the early white anti-Apartheid activists were Jewish and watched a warm video message from Nelson Mandela.
The Holocaust Centre tells a vivid and effective story of how another policy of “apart-ness” led to mass murder in Europe , using the stories of survivors who settled in South Africa. The parallel with Apartheid is not accidental and is meant to sensitize future generations to the dangers of intolerance.
A few blocks away, we slipped into the District Six museum to learn how an entire sector of the city, a ‘messy’ melange of recent arrivals, different races and all religions, was displaced and bulldozed when the zone was declared a ‘whites only’ area. The clearing done, a public outcry prevented much of the planned re- and the blocks surrounding the museum remain an open wasteland of grass and weeds today, a sad memorial to the harsh impact of racial policy.
The bus tour was a welcome opportunity to sit and relax, in a somewhat cold and blustery Cape spring, and watch the natural beauty of the city’s environs whiz by. The Kloot Nek Road along the paws of “Lion’s Head”, the Table Mountain Road up to the base of the cable car – with a magnificent vista over the city and Table Bay, and Camp Bay Drive, down the backside of Table
Mountain and along the beaches. This is the South Atlantic and the water is perennially too cold to swim, but the cliff-side homes are magnificent and so are their views over the white sand beaches and pounding surf.We ended our brief visit to the newly gentrified Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (still don’t know how Alfred bumped Albert?!) for a dinner of the freshest Calamari, fish and chips I’ve ever tasted, sitting on a picnic table over the water, while the sunset behind Signal Hill (or the Lion’s Rump) paints the clouds overhead a vivid pink and the grey clouds that clothe Table Mountain slip over the edge and into the city.
What did we miss? The sobering visit to Robbins Island where Nelson Mandela was held for over 2 decades, was out of reach because tickets on the ferry are booked weeks in advance, and the high springtime winds kept the Table Mountain Cable car grounded. And what of the residents of Capetown? Our very superficial interactions with them have been full of warm smiles and eye-contact – a sense that genuine connections can be there, if we give it some time.
With only the surface scratched, we’ll clearly need to return some day.
