Dave and Dad are…
On Robben Island.
Robben Island, one of Cape Town’s premier tourist attractions, is the island prison in the bay (a la Alcatraz) where Nelson Mandela spent a couple decades.
It’s been known as a leper colony, a defense platform during WWII, and one of the most prominent symbols of Apartheid Oppression, but really I’ve always known it as the tourist place I still hadn’t visited despite hitting the half-year mark.
But it’s expensive and difficult to get out to. Reachable only by boats, which are frequently booked and even more frequently cancelled due to high winds. So I figured I’d wait on the Old Man. He likes history.
We tried booking less than an hour after he got off the plane and still didn’t get our day of choice (though turns out that’s cause tomorrow the island hosts a FIFA meeting in preparation for Friday’s World Cup Draw) so instead we cabbed it down to the Waterfront (car exploded remember) for the morning tour. We got to the Waterfront in plenty of time, however to get to the ticket office/boat launch you have to cross a small bridge that swings out periodically to allow shipping to pass through the narrow channel into the inner harbor.
Picture unrelated to the story.
The bridge had just opened to let through a boat and apparently broke. Our options were wait and hope, be sweet talked into a ten second ferry ride by some enterprising but sneaky looking boatmen or walk around the damn inner harbor. Well we didn’t have a ton of time and we had an overabundance of trust in the guy making the announcement who assured us it was a mere ten minute walk so we hoofed it.
It wasn’t even a ten minute run, the damn circumference was far. We kept up a pretty good pace while still trying to maintain our dignity (and laughing at the couple in front of us who were abandoning any pretense of dignity that their hideous outfits had managed to leave them). We made it to the ticket window to pick up our tickets with about 15 minutes to spare, only to encounter a long line of idiot tourists. It went well with the idiot ticketing system that turned will call into a ten minute process of multiple phone calls, computer entries and forms of identification.
As our previously presumed cushion began to rapidly tick away we began to sweat a little more. Then finally we were one from the front…cept the one in front of us turned out to be some tour operator person who needed to make a series of ticket order alterations for a group of over ten. They were yelling last call for the boat long before we made the window.
Picture unrelated to the story.
Now the Old Man, like me already presuming shifting the tickets to the next boat in an hour, did a good job of trying to explain things but they didn’t want to hear it. Telling us that our tickets weren’t transferable despite the fact it was the bridge, and then their own retarded ticketing systems fault. Which led to at least one “We’ve been standing here for 15 minutes” outburst from me. So they decided to madly find our tickets and sent us running for the boat. I led the way with the tickets while the Old Man waited for them to give him back his credit card. I cruised through the metal detector (despite having all kinds of metal) and hit the end of the long dock with the boat clearly prepping to cast off. I had to sacrifice that dignity id been saving while not speed walking around the port to do the half jog to make it up the gangplank.
I was telling the sailor to hold on my dad is right behind me, only to turn and not even see him out the door yet. Turns out he had some trouble at the metal detector. By the time he’s out the door the gangplank has been taken in and they are casting the ropes off. He displayed some deceptive speed in running down that dock. I was standing at the rail encouraging him to jump (we were still close to the dock) but the damn guy wouldn’t do it. Instead he waited while the boat sort of drifted back and forth before doing the kind of long lean step that’s part jump, part almost the splits. But we did manage to haul him on. And we got the opportunity to embarrass ourselves in front of a whole packed boat of fanny-packers with nothing to do but laugh at the even more inept tourists trying to catch a ride.
Siiiigh.
After that, the rest of the trip was anticlimactic.
The boat ride was cool. Awesome view of the city that I’d only previously seen while pirating off these waters. Once we were on the island the tour itself was a little weird. It was two hours, the first hour was spent in a bus that took you around and told you about the lepers and the couple hundred people who live there now, and the animals etc.
The second half was a tour of the prison which are all conducted by political prisoners who were incarcerated here. That is really cool on one level, though the Old Man and I discussed what it must be like to spend every day going back through a place where you endured so much, but on a practical level it means the guides guiding ability can be somewhat suspect.
And it was a pretty brief tour that gave you really no time to pause, explore or try to get a sense of the atmosphere this place must have had. In that regard it was pretty much the antithesis of the way the Alcatraz tour is set up (though granted I took Alcatraz’s evening tour, which is designed to create more of a sense of the experience).
It was alright though I spose, and definitely something that had to be done, and shoot, we both made it back on thereturn boat with time to spare. At least five or six people climbed on after us. Success!
Back on dry land I left the Old Man to the wonders of Waterfront shopping while I went and worked out the variety of annoying and expensive details pertaining to two rental cars from two rental car places. But eventually I made it back to pick him up in an Avis rent-a-car so new it even had a cd player. (Listen for this family, that’s the pinnacle of car technology.)
We used this chariot to drive up to Lions Head and do the sunset hike.
It was nice, the only thing was, it was a full moon so the mountain was mobbed with people. (The full moon hike is a big deal here. Cause you can hike up and see the sunset over Camps Bay then turn around and watch the full moon rise over the city bowl and then hike down in the moonlight.) I’d never done the exact day of full moon before and we had not anticipated the Disneyworld esque line of hikers going up the hill. Shoot I had to park so far away just getting to the base about equated the amount of effort scaling the summit normally takes.
Ultimately for that reason (and not in anyway because the Old Man has creaky old knees) we stopped short of the summit on a wide crest. The swell of people where the path narrowed at the top just looked too packed and miserable to justify continuation. Instead we spread out our stuff, had wine and banana bread and watched the sunset.
We then came down with the last gasps of light still in the sky as several in our party were concerned about falling all the way down the hill. We were back at the bottom before the moon really rose but that actually ended up being way cooler because looking back up the mountain you could see this long line of flashlight points snaking around the hill.
It looked like someone wrapped Lions Head in blinking white Christmas lights. It was phenomenally beautiful, and much easier to appreciate from down below. Unfortunately none of the pics I tried remotely did it justice.