What is wrong with my relationship
with the world’s great cities?
I never end up doing what I’m supposed to do.
The first time I went to Paris I never climbed the Eiffel
Tower and the first time I went to Rome I didn’t
set foot inside St Peter’s, just because I never
got round to them. And here I am again on my way to
the airport without having reached the top of Table
Mountain.
Next time. This is my approach to the world’s
great cities: I assume I’ll be back. Cape Town
is a shock of delight. I’ve seen the pictures,
I know its reputation, but its physical glamour still
takes the breath away. It’s not so much a city
as a natural wonder where the human imprint seems incidental
and despite all the City Bowl high rises, swooping highways
and imposing new waterfront football stadium, pretty
much insignificant.
Everywhere you turn you bump into Table Mountain; not
just the familiar flat profile of its summit but the
outriders of Lion’s Head and Devil’s Peak,
its frieze of massive buttresses, the Twelve Apostles,
its verdant ridges and slopes, reaching into the back
gardens of urban guest houses and homes. Everywhere
you drive you travel round or between bits of Table
Mountain. You don’t need to take the cable car
to the top to appreciate its overwhelming place at the
city’s heart, but if you want a sense of what
the early mariners must have felt when they first made
this incomparable landfall you should take the ferry
to Robben Island.
This, of course, is not the main reason why people
visit Robben Island. It’s a mere 19 years since
this infamous emblem of the apartheid regime released
its last political prisoners. One of them was Theophalous
Mzukwa, known as Muthe. He was freed in 1991, four years
into a 25-year sentence for “treason”.
Muthe is one of the former political prisoners who
now guide visitors round this bleak museum, a complex
of H blocks where Nelson Mandela’s cell has been
left as it was since the day he was transferred to a
mainland prison. Today the island is a World Heritage
Site and a visitor “experience” of some
potency.
You do Cape Town a disservice if you embrace only its
sunny, beach-and-braai culture, fabulous cuisine and
handsome shops, and ignore its inequable past and present
– and perhaps the most affecting symbol of that
great divide is the five-mile crossing over to the slab
of scrub and rock in Table Bay.
The sleek catamaran at Nelson Mandela Gateway, on Victoria
And Albert Waterfront, is out of commission. I’m
not sorry. We’re embarked instead on one of the
original prison ferries with unrestricted views fore
and aft. For a wildlife geek like me the excursion has
added value: four dolphins chasing our wake, fur seals
slouched on the harbour rocks and an island colony of
African penguins.
About 200 people still live on the island, museum staff,
guides and their families. You can wander around on
your own, but with limited time I take the 30-minute
bus tour and guided prison visit. The bus has an upbeat
aphorism painted on the chassis: “The journey
isn’t long when freedom’s the destination.”
But the lime quarry where Mandela and other ANC activists
toiled, and the cells where they froze in winter and
stifled in summer must have seemed like ugly landmarks
on a journey without end.
No-one ever escaped from Robben Island, which was used
to isolate prisoners for more than 300 years. In the
early 19th century a Xhosa chief imprisoned by the British
tried to swim to the mainland, and was found drowned
on the shores of Table Bay.
I’m pursuing a strategy of exploring three different
elements of the sprawling city by staying in three different
residential areas. Suburbs are not usually high on the
sight-seeing agenda, but these ones have exceptional
features. Cape Town’s southern suburbs reach down
the Cape Peninsula to the edge of the Cape Of Good Hope
Nature Reserve, and some of them are so detached from
the city by sea and mountain they feel like separate
communities.
I begin my stay in affluent Constantia, which is only
20 minutes drive from both airport and city centre but
feels rural – especially at Constantia Uitsig,
a boutique hotel on one of the Cape’s oldest wine
estates.
Here I’m joined by my daughter. She has been
working at the other end of the country and has made
a three-day journey by road and economy-class rail to
enjoy the benefits of travelling with her creditworthy
mother: good food, quality accommodation and spa treatments.
Constantia Utisig has all three, with 16 rooms distributed
in Cape Dutch cottages around its sumptuous grounds,
a palatial spa and three award-winning restaurants.
We test the claims of the most celebrated, La Colombe,
and are not disappointed.
From Constantia it’s an easy leap over the Silvermine
hills to Noordhoek, on the Atlantic seaboard at one
end of Chapman’s Peak Drive, the cliffhanging
road considered the most dramatic coastal route in South
Africa. Noordhoek is a smallish, newish suburb with
undistinguished architecture but several redeeming features,
including the five-mile beach of Chapman’s Bay,
where you can gallop horses and bathe in cold, wild
waters.
It’s also perfectly placed for a day trip round
the peninsula, beating the tour buses down to the Cape
of Good Hope and Cape Point.
For a world traveller I can sometimes be very naïve.
I’ve seen wildlife programmes about precipitous
Cape Point and I’m expecting near-pristine wilderness,
with perhaps David Attenborough pointing out beachcombing
baboons and breaching Great Whites. Instead we find
a huge car park, an efficient battery of public toilets,
a funicular railway to the lighthouse, and a restaurant.
But the views are sensational and there is a clifftop
walk to the Cape Of Good Hope, which is much more low-key
and has ostriches on the foreshore.
Noordhoek’s other asset is Afton Grove Country
Retreat, Cape Town hotel accommodation is a peaceful
enclave of lush gardens, pretty cottage rooms, farmhouse
restaurant and pool, where owners Chris and Louise Spengler
are enthusiastic guides to the walks, wildlife and culture
of the peninsula.
The hospitable Spenglers have invited Cass Abrahams,
South Africa’s leading authority on Cape Malay
cuisine, to prepare and host dinner. “Cass teaches,
writes and broadcasts,” explains Chris. “We
want her to teach our kitchen staff how to prepare dishes
we can offer guests.”
And so we sit down with Cass and her husband Jowa to
a feast of pickled fish, chicken beryani and other Cape
Malay delicacies, and as the conversation turns to their
lives as academics under the apartheid regime, their
international travels and the new South Africa it seems
unimaginable that for most of their lives this thoughtful,
sophisticated, mixed-race couple could not live in a
“whites only” area, could not bathe on a
“whites only” beach and could not vote.
We see more Cape Malay influences when we arrive at
our final guest house, in the City Bowl suburb of Gardens.
Almost at once I identify Welgelegen Guest House, a
roomy Victorian mansion on the skirts of Table Mountain,
as the place I want to stay on my next visit. It’s
only two minutes’ walk from lively Kloof Street
(boutiques, restaurants and cafes) and a few minutes’
drive from the city centre, and its elegance, character
and welcoming staff redefine my expectations of guest
house hospitality.
It’s also within easy reach of some significant
landmarks: the shamelessly pink Mount Nelson Hotel,
Cape Town’s grande dame; the 17th-century Company
Gardens, the city’s oldest cultivated plot of
land, and the Cape Malay quarter of Bo-Kaap.
Once an exclusively Muslim network of brightly coloured
19th-century terraces and “picturesque”
slums, Bo-Kaap is now yielding some of its identity
to restoration and the property market. We do a lightning-fast
tour of the new shopping development of Cape Quarter,
which conserves the human scale of the district and
showcases the eclectic creativity of South African design.
And now for Table Mountain. The summit is clear, we
can see the cable car line from Kloof Street. But a
robust version of the Cape Doctor, the south-east wind
which soothes the fevered brow of the sizzling summer,
has closed the stations for the day.
Next time.
British Airways has daily flights from London Heathrow
to Cape Town. Aardvark Safaris Scotland (www. aardvarksafaris.co
.uk, 01578 760222) offers packages at guesthouses including
Constantia Uitsig, Afton Grove and Welgelegen.
For more information visit www.afton.co.za
With special thanks to our Scottish travel writer :
Julie
Davidson
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