Back in October, I decided to do an internship the next summer in Cape Town. With so much going on, I put it to the back of my mind. But the summer came around so quickly and I became tentative and wondered if I shouldn’t have explored the alternatives that were, perhaps, a bit nearer to home. As soon as I arrived however I was thrown into a completely different culture and environment, with a family that embraced me from the beginning, and I began to live the next five weeks as a Capetonian. I would need a whole book of memoirs to do my trip justice, but here I’ll just focus on a few highlights.
The brilliant thing about staying with a family is that they can tell you places to go to that, as a typical tourist, you would never know of or discover in a guidebook. Langebaan for example, a beach north of Cape Town, was not only stunning but safe for children, perfect for my host mum’s adorable grandchildren, and safe from sharks. I will willingly admit that the notion of sharks did tend to scare me, slightly. With the South African coastline hosting ‘shark alley’ at certain times of the year, (where Great Whites come to feast off the abundant seal population), I was tentative about venturing anywhere near the ocean, even just to dip my toes for a Southern Hemisphere mid-Winter paddle. Luckily the surfers are not so scared and False Bay, on the southern seaboard, boasts some of the best waves in the world. Or so we were told by a dude who, at the summit of Table Mountain in a biting wind and chilling mist, was still wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, sported a tattoo of the WWF panda wearing sunglasses, had three duvets in the back of his car for his surf boards and lived his entire life according to the maxim ‘hike, surf and party.’
Most of our leisure time was spent wandering around and though I felt obliged to go to the Castle of Good Hope and the Company Gardens, afternoons spent hidden in cafes amongst wood carvings and beaded necklaces in Greenmarket Square were much more interesting. The same went for a shopping mall on the way to the Waterfront, where we felt completely at home in the Food Lovers Market or when staring into the ocean at Kalk Bay harbour a group of oversized seals appeared, hovering around for the insides of the day’s catch of snoek. Or Camps Bay where we took a trip on the first mildly warm day to lie on a deserted beach for the afternoon; the locals knew they had plenty of time to enjoy the sun when the summer properly arrived, but we as opportune Brits who head to the beach at the first sign of sun were not going to spend the time inside.
One of the things that struck me most was the wildlife. Even the Cape Peninsula is remarkable. I just couldn’t get used to virtually guaranteed sightings of penguins, seals and often dolphins in the water around Table Bay, and springbok, baboons and ostrich when venturing out further into the veld- I’m lucky to see a wild rabbit at home! On the boat to Robben Island I virtually leapt out of my seat every time a seal poked his head out of the water, to the amusement of my friend from San Francisco who remarked, ‘you don’t get many seals in England, do you?’ We also got to see a few Southern Right Whales in Hermanus, where in gale force winds we clung on to the rocks at Gearing’s Point in the chance that they might leap out of the water as they seem to do all of the time on television- they didn’t. We also managed to squeeze in a sizeable amount of wine tasting. As someone used to the cheapest bottle of bubbly from the Co-op, I put on my best wine tasting face and engaged in some proper wine chat about the ‘herbaceous’ and ‘woody undertone’ quality of the Pinotage grape. It seemed, at the time, a completely sensible idea to have 12 bottles shipped back to England… Though after a while, one wine did tend to taste just as fruity and rich and sweet as another, and I think instead of leaving the winelands with an educated pallet, I managed to just get steadily drunker as the afternoons progressed.
Despite one weekend driving as far into South Africa as the distance from London to Newcastle, I barely managed to scratch the surface of the country in terms of the amount there is to see. But the experience of living and working in Cape Town, coming home to a Cape Malay curry on the Metro or Long Street the night before the South Africa v Argentina rugby game made for the most fun, exciting and busy August, and it was just a bonus that it meant I managed to escape London’s Olympic hysteria!
