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Overlanding Through Africa
  • Happy Days Travel
  • Mark Wade

Overlanding Through Africa

This is the big one - the trip we have been planning since before the pandemic! We will be overlanding from South Africa 🇿🇦 to Kenya 🇰🇪 passing through 9 other countries and taking four months. Read more
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  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Blue route to Hout Bay

    June 5, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C

    We then caught the blue route bus, which took us to Hout Bay before returning to the waterfront on the same coast road as the red route.

    We arrived back at 4.50pm and speed walked back to the laundry place to pick up our washing before she closed at 5pm! We just made it.

    Back at Never@Home, we popped next door to Spar and bought a whole cooked chicken, which we had with salad and new potatoes. After dinner, Mark messaged Lyn to see if we can meet up with them at the weekend. It is over 30 years since he last saw them!!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Cape Town Street Scenes

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 9 °C

    We were up reasonably early this morning as we wanted to catch the 9am red route bus to Table Mountain. We had toast and cheese for breakfast and then made our way to the waterfront. It was a beautiful, sunny morning with the same forecast for the rest of the day.

    At the City Sightseeing office, we bought cable car tickets and caught the 9am bus as planned. We sat upstairs outside today. It wasn’t particularly warm, but it was bearable in order to get some decent photos!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Table Mountain

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 10 °C

    At Table Mountain, we joined the relatively short queue for the cable car. We only had to wait about 30 minutes, but behind us, there were people who would have to wait a couple of hours. We did the right thing by coming early!

    Flat-topped Table Mountain is South Africa’s most iconic landmark, attracting visitors from all over the world. In recent years, it has been recognised as one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature. It features on the flag of the city of Cape Town.

    The rocks on the mountain are over 600 million years old, making it one of the oldest mountains in the world. It hosts the richest floral kingdom on earth with more than 1470 species, 70% of which are endemic, meaning they are not found anywhere else.

    The human history of the mountain goes back over 30,000 years. There is some evidence that it was inhabited in the Stone Age. Hand axes from this period have been found here. The mountain was sacred for the Khoi and San people who named it ‘Hoerikwaggo’ meaning ‘Mountain in the Sea’. They believed their god, Tsui or Goab, lived there.

    The first person known to have climbed the mountain was Portuguese navigator Admiral Antonio de Saldanha, who gave it the name ‘Taboa da Caba’ meaning ‘Table of the Cape’.

    Table Mountain is 1086 metres high. Some people climb to the top, but most use the cable car, which was first installed in 1929. Needless to say, it has undergone several improvements in the last century! Over 35 million people have now taken the cable car to the summit.

    Today’s Rotair cable car runs on a double cable, making it more stable in high winds and giving a faster journey of just four to five minutes to the summit. Each car carries 65 passengers. The floors of the cars rotate through 360 degrees during the ascent and descent, giving passengers a panoramic view. It’s an amazing experience!

    Once we reached the top, it was really windy, but the breathtaking views made the trip worth it. We marvelled at the sight of Cape Town, and its suburbs laid out beneath us. Robben Island was clearly visible just off shore. We walked around all of the boarded walkways but resisted the urge to go off-piste to take selfies in dangerously precarious places, as many younger visitors were doing! We weren’t tempted to join the group who were abseiling down the mountain, either!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Lunch at Camps Bay

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C

    Back on the ground, and out of the fierce wind, we caught the next City Sightseeing bus. We were on it for just a couple of stops as we wanted to explore Camps Bay.

    This upmarket beach suburb has a number of five-star hotels and high-class restaurants, such as Caprice, where celebrities like Prince Harry, Leonardo di Caprio, and J-Lo have been spotted. The beach is certainly beautiful. Despite the winter temperatures, several people were posing in the sun wearing very little, presumably for their Instagram feeds.

    We went to the Bella Bistro on the seafront for a posh (but light!) lunch. Mark had mussels, and I had roasted tomato soup. Both were served with homemade sourdough bread, and both were delicious! It was very pleasant to sit and watch how the other half live for an hour or so!😊    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    A canal cruise

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 17 °C

    After a walk along the prom, which I imagine is rammed in the summer months, we caught a bus back to the waterfront.

    Once there, we took a canal cruise, another activity run by City Sightseeing. Cape Town doesn’t have much of a canal system, so it was a short cruise, but interesting nevertheless. The canal area has all been reclaimed from the sea and is now home to loads of top-end apartments and the six-star One and Only Hotel and Spa – another opportunity for us to see how the other half live! Madonna, David Beckham, Oprah Winfrey, and Elton John all own penthouse apartments here!Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa
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    A drink in the sunshine

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 17 °C

    Following our cruise, we had a wander around the waterfront to take some better photos with the sun shining. There was a very talented group of African singers and dancers whose performance we enjoyed for a while. We then found somewhere to sit and have a drink in the sun while doing yet more people watching. I enjoyed my first apèrol spritz in a long time!Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Sunset from Signal Hill

    June 6, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C

    At 4.30pm, we made our way back to the City Sightseeing office for our sunset bus trip, which was included in the price of our day ticket. We went to the top of Signal Hill, where the bus waited for us to enjoy the sunset over the Atlantic Ocean. We bought a coffee from a funky drinks truck to go with the chicken salad rolls we had brought with us. The light was amazing, and we got some lovely clear shots of Cape Town below us while we waited for the sun to go down. We also enjoyed watching the paragliding adrenaline junkies who were throwing themselves off the mountain – I’ve never seen them up close before!
    When the sunset happened, it didn’t disappoint. The colours were stunning! We all oohed and aahed as if we’d never seen it before! 😂

    The bus trip back to the waterfront was very quick. The driver certainly wasn’t hanging about now that it was dark!

    Back at the hotel, Mark had had a reply from Lyn saying that Steve’s sister, Elaine (who Mark knows), has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is undergoing treatment. They can’t meet us this weekend, but still want to catch up before we leave Cape Town. Mark had a conversation with Lyn and later with Steve, so contact has been established. We’ve left it up to them to get in touch when it’s good for them.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Township tour

    June 9, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    We’ve spent the last couple of very rainy days at the hostel. We’ve got caught up with all our washing and repacked our camping bag with our mattresses and bedding ready for our next trip. Mark got his hair cut. We both edited photos, and I completed my trip notes so far and made a good attempt at catching up with social media posts. I also needed to make a call to the UK to renew our house insurance. We organised to stay here in Green Point until the start of our next overlanding leg on 25th June and booked activities for the rest of our stay in Cape Town. Mark cooked a very, very spicy chilli for dinner one night, which sent me running next door to Spar to buy a yoghurt! Last night, we had decidedly non-spicy pork fillet, salad, and new potatoes! We watched All Quiet on the Western Front which we missed when it came out last year, and started watching After Life by Ricky Gervais, which we’ve never seen because we don’t have Netflix at home! All in all, it was a very productive couple of days!😊

    Today, we were going on a pre-booked townships tour, so were up promptly. After breakfast, we walked down to the City Sightseeing office at the waterfront for our 10am pick-up. Our driver was 20 minutes late, so there was no need for us to have rushed! We had one other person on our tour, a university student from Wolverhampton studying international relations at St Andrews. He had just arrived in the city after spending a week in Johannesburg. His trip was funded by his university as he was researching post-apartheid South Africa. He was an interesting guy to chat to.

    Our tour would take us to three townships. On the way, our driver (who is from the second township we were to visit) thanked us for visiting his community and told us to forget any misgivings we may have been having about taking part in ‘poverty tourism’. I must admit that I had been feeling a little uneasy, but, as he explained, the money we had paid for the tour would help everyone in the townships. Tourism in general is the lifeblood for him, his family, his friends, and his neighbours, who are employed at the airport, in hotels and restaurants, as tour guides, as security guards, as cleaners and gardeners, etc. He told us that whilst there is gang violence in the townships, tourists will always be safe as the general population will make sure they are. He stressed the importance of tourist visits to his community in terms of them getting a better understanding of modern South Africa and sharing their knowledge with others. Personally, I was reassured. Everyone we met subsequently in the townships was extremely friendly and welcoming.

    Townships, or informal settlements, are racially divided suburbs on the outskirts of South Africa’s big cities. They came about as a result of Pass Laws, a form of internal passport system designed to segregate the population, manage urbanization, and allocate migrant labour. Also known as the natives' law, pass laws severely limited the movements of black African citizens and other ethnic groups by restricting them to designated areas outside of city centres. Men were then forced to leave their families and return to the cities to find work. This led to them living in hostels in townships on the city’s outskirts. They were employed in factories and mines and were housed in large dormitories with shared cooking facilities and rudimentary ablution blocks. When the Pass Laws were repealed, wives and children were allowed to join the men. This resulted in very cramped living conditions with basic shacks being built so that families could escape the crowded dormitories. As more and more people arrived, the townships we see today evolved.

    The first township we visited was Langa, the oldest township in the Cape Town area, created in the 1920s as a result of the 1923 Urban Areas Act, the latest incarnation of the Pass Laws, which were first seen in South Africa as long ago as 1760. It is one of many areas in South Africa designated solely for black Africans even before the apartheid era, which we are all so familiar with, began.

    Langa means ‘sun’ in Xhosa, but that’s not why the township got its name. It is named after Langalibalele, a chief and renowned rainmaker who was imprisoned on Robben Island in 1873 for rebelling against the Natal government.

    Langa was originally designed in a way to allow the authorities to keep tight control on its residents. In the early years, local laws prohibited the brewing of sorghum beer (utywala). This was strongly resented. In the 1930s, the authorities abolished prohibition and built municipal beer halls, realising that alcoholic citizens were easier to control than those who didn’t drink alcohol! We visited one of these beer halls, which has now been divided into 20 individual units, each housing a family. There are shared ablutions outside.

    Today, Langa is located just off the N2 highway, a few kilometres south of the centre of Cape Town. It occupies an area of just over three square kilometres and is home to more than 75,000 people. The vast majority of these people are Xhosa.

    We stopped to pick up a local resident who was to act as our guide on a walking tour of the township. Our first stop was at the building, which served as the courtroom during the apartheid era. Citizens had to come here to pay for the privilege of renewing their ‘dompass’, a derogatory term meaning ‘stupid pass’.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Langa township

    June 9, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C

    We then walked through the various parts of Langa, which is clearly divided into lower class, middle class, and upper class areas.

    The lower classes still live in makeshift shacks and shared spaces. These people don’t have to pay rent or water (which comes from a shared stand pipe outdoors), but they do have to pay for electricity, which is metered. The poorest of all, who can’t afford electricity, either steal it or live without it. These lower class areas continue to grow as people come from other African countries, such as Zimbabwe, Congo, and Nigeria. Such people pay protection money to gang leaders to enable them to live peacefully in the township. The government generally turns a blind eye to the growing population problem. In some places, they have installed a small number of ‘portaloos’ and plumbed them in to mains drainage, saying that they have provided basic sanitation and ‘reasonable living conditions’ for people in the townships. This does not take into account that there is no refuse collection or medical care in the poorest parts of Langa or that people have to share cramped living spaces with many others.

    Middle-class people in Langa live in small brick and mortar homes. Many of them have to share the space with other families. Most of these homes were built in the mid-nineties following the end of apartheid. Since then, there have been very few new homes constructed. The waiting time for one of these homes is around 15 to 20 years! People who do live in them have to pay rent to the government, so they are usually jobholders, either running small businesses within the township, or commuting to Cape Town each day to work as maids, security guards, waiters, etc.

    The upper classes within the townships live in nice houses with gardens. They work as doctors, teachers, accountants, etc. Some choose to stay in Langa to give back to the community they grew up in. However, many others are unable to move out due to the prohibitively high house prices in predominantly white suburbs.

    There is, unfortunately, still a huge wealth disparity between black and white in South Africa. When I asked our guide if there was any resentment in the townships thirty years after democracy came to the country, he said, ‘Of course, but we feel powerless. Politicians of all persuasions are corrupt. There is nothing we can do.’ It is a sad indictment of what we have come to know as a varied, vibrant, youthful nation full of hope and optimism. But is this a false impression given to travellers passing through? I hope South Africa finds a way to bring a decent standard of living to all its citizens, not just the white and privileged few black ones.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Khayelitsha and Gugulethu townships

    June 9, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 17 °C

    From Langa, we went to Khayelitsha, meaning ‘new home’ in Xhosa. It is the largest and fastest-growing township in South Africa, covering an area of around 40 square kilometres and providing homes for more than half a million people. Some estimate that the actual population could be as many as a million or more. It was established in the 1980s. 70% of the 150,000 households live in self-built shacks made of corrugated metal, pallet wood, or cardboard, with a third of them having to walk more than 200 metres to access water. 99.5% of the residents are black African, the vast majority of them Xhosa. Khayelitsha has a very young population, with fewer than 7% of its residents being over 50 years old and over 40% being under 19.

    We didn’t stop in Khayelitsha. Instead, we drove on to Gugulethu, established in the 1960s due to the overcrowding of Langa, which was the only black residential area for Cape Town at the time. Its name is a contraction of igugu lethu, which is Xhosa for ‘our pride’. The township covers an area of 6.5 square kilometres and has a population of around 120,000.

    Gugulethu is the only township that has monuments to commemorate events. The first is the 'Gugulethu Seven Memorial', built to remember the lives of seven activists who were ambushed and killed by the South African security forces on March 3, 1986. The activists were members of the armed wing of the ANC. The monument was unveiled on Human Rights Day 2000.

    The other memorial is for Amy Biehl, a Fulbright scholar from America studying at the University of Cape Town, who was pulled from a car and stabbed and stoned to death as she drove three friends home to Gugulethu on August 25th 1993. Four men were convicted of her murder. With the full support of Amy’s parents, all four were pardoned by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998.

    We stopped at a restaurant in Gugulethu for lunch before returning to the waterfront in Capetown.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    A visit to an Irish pub

    June 9, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 17 °C

    Back at the waterfront, we had a walk around the sea wall to make the most of the afternoon sunshine before stopping at the Irish pub for a drink. Mark had a standard lager. I fancied an ice cream shake, so I ordered a blueberry one. It turned out to be the sweetest thing I have ever tasted! It made me feel quite ill 😊.

    On the way back to the hotel, we called at Spar to buy some nice bread, cheese, and grapes to have this evening while we watched a movie. Living the high life!! 😂    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Oranjezicht City Farm Weekend Market

    June 10, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C

    After breakfast this morning (during which we had a very interesting conversation with a girl from New Zealand who works in genetic research specifically for patients with various forms of restricted growth), we walked the short distance down past the impressive Green Point stadium to the Oranjezicht City Farm Market which is on every Saturday and Sunday morning. It was the best market we’ve been to in a long time!

    There were stalls selling everything from antiques to plants and flowers to homemade crafts. Best of all, though, was the superb food market!! All of the vendors were very generous with their tasting samples, and we took full advantage! We bought some local olive oil, a grape-based balsamic reduction, a jar of delicious lime and tequila marmalade, and some fresh olive and cheese breadsticks. We vowed to return tomorrow to buy fresh salad and potatoes. We couldn’t carry it today as we were catching the boat to Robben Island.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Rhinos art installation

    June 10, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    From the market, we continued to the waterfront, where we admired a new art installation made up of painted papier-maché rhinos aimed at raising awareness of wildlife conservation issues.

    We then had time to enjoy a drink and a croissant as we watched the boats go by in the harbour.Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Robben Island

    June 10, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C

    Our boat trip was due to leave at 1pm, so we were there early to ensure we got a seat on the upper deck. In the event, we were late leaving as we needed oil! However, we spent the time admiring the view of Cape Town (it has to be one of the most attractive cities in the world!) and watching seals frolicking in the water. Once we got going, it was a pleasant 30-minute cruise in the sunshine across to Robben Island.

    As we approached, we were struck by how lovely the island looked with its freshly-painted houses (homes to 300 Robben Island Museum staff members and their families), a couple of churches, lots of kelp forests, and the blue waters gently lapping against the rocks on the shoreline. There was little to prepare us for the island’s notorious history.

    Robben Island, meaning ‘seal island’ in Dutch, is a South African National Heritage Site, as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located at the entrance to Table Bay, 11 kilometres from Cape Town, the island was discovered by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and later used by Portuguese, Dutch, and English navigators as a refuelling station. Since the end of the seventeenth century, Robben Island has been used as a prison, mainly to incarcerate political prisoners. It was also used as a leper colony and animal quarantine station. During the second world war, the island was fortified as part of Cape Town’s defences.

    In 1961, the South African government began using Robben Island as a prison once more, both for convicted common criminals and political activists. The maximum security prison for political prisoners closed in 1991. The medium security prison for criminal prisoners was closed five years later.

    Today, Robben Island operates as a living museum and wildlife conservation area. There is a colony of African penguins on the island, but we didn’t see any of them. The only wildlife we saw was a leopard tortoise, which I had to ask some young boys not to touch!

    When we landed on the island, its purpose as a prison was immediately obvious with high concrete walls and barbed wire much in evidence. We were transferred to buses and taken on a 45-minute tour of the island. Our guide on the bus was very informative, although we struggled to hear him at times due to several annoying Indian tourists behind us who wouldn’t stop talking! He pointed out the churches and the island’s graveyard, which includes a lepers’ section. He also showed us the former prison governor’s house, which now serves as a conference centre. We stopped to see the view of Table Mountain from the island and used the facilities which are in a building built as a pub for prison warders! We also paused to look at the lime quarry, where prisoners were subject to hard labour, resulting in many of them suffering sight loss due to a combination of lime dust and bright sunshine. Our final stop before visiting the prison was to see the house where Robert Sobukwe, founder and first president of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), was kept in solitary confinement for six years.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Maximum security prison, Robben Island

    June 10, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C

    When we reached the maximum security prison, we left the bus and were taken on a walking tour by a former inmate who was incarcerated in 1986 following his participation in student protests against apartheid. It was very sobering to hear his stories of the treatment they received and to see the conditions in which they lived. We were particularly moved to see the tiny cell where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 of the 27 years he spent in prison. One bright moment was to see the apple tree and the grapevine still thriving in the yard where Mandela planted them many years ago.

    After our tour, we returned to the mainland by boat. We got there too late to look around the exhibition at the Nelson Mandela Gateway, so we will have to go back another day. We headed back to the hotel, stopping on the way to have a Chinese meal for dinner. It was very good!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    An easy day

    June 11, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ 🌬 16 °C

    The forecast was for wall-to-wall rain from 11am today, so we returned to the market early doors to buy salad, new potatoes, and chicken for dinner. We also treated ourselves to a couple of really delicious-looking desserts and a couple of savoury pies for lunch! If that was our local market all the time, we’d be broke! 😂

    Back at the hotel, the predicted rain never materialised! Nevertheless, we spent the rest of the day indoors. I wrote and posted, while Mark listened to podcasts and did the laundry!

    This evening, we had a fabulous meal with all the goodies we’ve been buying locally!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    St. George's Cathedral

    June 12, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    I had a sleepless night due to the heavy rain and the storm raging outside. Mark slept like a log! 😊
    Despite an iffy weather forecast, we headed out after breakfast to walk to the centre of downtown Cape Town. It only takes about 30 minutes, and we managed to get there in the dry. Once there, we retraced the steps we took with Sheldon last Monday as we wanted to take more photos and go into some of the places he’d recommended.

    Our first stop was at St George’s Cathedral, where Desmond Tutu served as archbishop from 1986 to 1996. His ashes are interred in front of the high altar. We were hoping to see the memorial stone, but that area of the cathedral is out of bounds to visitors.

    St George's Cathedral is the oldest cathedral in southern Africa. The original St George's Church was built in the style of St Pancras Church in London, featuring six stone pillars whose places are marked today by oak trees on the cathedral steps. It opened at Christmas 1834 and was made a cathedral in 1847 in anticipation of the arrival of the first Anglican Bishop in Africa, Robert Gray. However, he didn't like it. LBoth Bishop Gray and his successor William West Jones wanted a grander cathedral, but neither lived to see it built.

    The current building was designed by the famous architect Herbert Baker. The foundation stone was laid in 1901 by the future King George V, but construction did not begin until 1906. The main part of the cathedral was completed in 1936, the Lady Chapel was finished in 1963, and the Bell Tower was added as recently as 1978. The cathedral remains a work-in-progress, with plans to add a Chapter House.

    The cathedral is in the gothic style and is a classic cruciform building, with a courtyard garden, which includes a labyrinth. There is some stunning stained glass within the building, as well as plaques to commemorate visits by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in 1995, and the then Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall in 2011. We were following in illustrious footsteps!    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Company's Garden

    June 12, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    From the Cathedral, we revisited the Company’s Garden, the oldest garden in South Africa. It was first created as a refreshment station for the trade route that rounded the tip of Africa between Europe and the east. Ships sent by the Dutch East India Company would stop by after months at sea and stock up on fresh produce grown in the garden, hence ‘The Company's Garden’. Master gardener Hendrik Boom prepared the first ground for sowing on 29 April 1652. The settlers sowed different kinds of seeds and kept detailed records each day. Through trial and error, they managed to compile a calendar which they used for the sowing and harvesting throughout the year. At first they grew salad herbs, peas, large beans, radish, beet, spinach, wheat, cabbage, asparagus, and turnips among others. They caught fish, trapped wild animals and traded with the Khoisan people for cattle and sheep in exchange for copper and tobacco. By 1653, the garden allowed the settlers to become self-sustainable throughout the year. By 1658, nearly every garden plant of Europe and India was already cultivated in the garden, though potatoes and maize were not yet introduced.

    Before 1680, the Company's Garden was mainly used to produce vegetables, but then Simon van der Stel redesigned the ground with the aim of beautifying the garden. Later, the garden was made famous by writers of various nationalities, who extolled its virtues, claiming that visitors who had seen the most celebrated gardens of Europe and India were agreed that nowhere else in the world had such a great variety of trees, shrubs, vegetables, and flowers in one place.

    Today, the garden is home to various statues and memorials, including ones of Cecil John Rhodes, Field Marshal General Jan Christian Smuts, and Major General Sir Henry Timson Lukin. It is also where you will find a surprisingly large number of pure white squirrels! The much more common grey squirrel, which is indigenous to North America, was introduced to Cape Town by Cecil John Rhodes at the beginning of the 20th century. In the past century or so, a mutation of albino squirrels has emerged. We were really surprised when we saw the first one and rushed to take photos of it. By the time we’d seen 30 or 40 of them, we quickly became blasé about them 😊.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Truth Coffee

    June 12, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C

    After leaving the garden, it started to rain, so we headed for Truth, the oldest coffee shop in Cape Town, located in an old factory building and decorated in the steampunk style. It’s a really cool place. We had coffee and lunch. As well as roasting their own coffee beans, they also make their own sourdough bread, so Mark ordered a cheese, tomato, and basil toastie, and I had roasted tomato, garlic, and truffle soup. Both were delicious!Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    District Six Museum

    June 12, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C

    By the time we’d had lunch, it had stopped raining. We made our way across the road to visit the District Six Museum. This museum came into being in 1994. It is housed in a former Methodist church and serves as a remembrance of the once vibrant multi-racial area that existed here before the citizens were forcibly removed from their homes during apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s. On 11 February 1966, it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60,000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.

    It is called District Six because in 1867 the area became the sixth municipal district of Cape Town.

    The museum tells the stories of the individuals and families who lived and worked in District Six. Their lives are remembered through photos, recordings, and tableaux. For me, a highlight of the exhibition was a collection of family recipes embroidered on to cloth so as to be handed down through the generations. We listened to one lady whose family was evicted when she was just sixteen years old. Like thousands of others, she is still fighting to have the land her family home was built on returned to her.

    After our museum visit, we walked back to the hotel, getting there just before it rained again. I spent the rest of the afternoon writing my notes and editing photos. We had a similar dinner to yesterday, and then spent the evening watching the rest of After Life.    Read more

  • Overlanding Through Africa

    Boulders Beach

    June 13, 2023 in South Africa ⋅ 🌧 16 °C

    The forecast today was for non-stop rain, but we had pre-booked a tour of Cape Point, so we had to venture out! We left after breakfast and managed to walk down to the waterfront to catch our bus without getting too wet.

    In a nod to the expected bad weather, the bus was an enclosed double-decker rather than the more usual open-top one. We were at the front of the queue and managed to nab two of the front seats upstairs. As we drove out of the city, this wasn’t much of an advantage as the rain was pelting down and the windows kept steaming up! Our guide, Rico, did his best to keep everyone’s spirits up and provided a good commentary about what we could be seeing if the rain stopped!!

    We drove over to the other side of the Cape Peninsula and picked up the opposite coast road at Muizenberg. The rain had eased by now, so we were able to catch glimpses of the colourful beach huts this resort is famous for. We continued through the craft town of Kalk Bay to Simon’s Town, the former home of the British Navy in South Africa. There is a railway line that runs along this coast. It could be something nice to do on a better day.

    Just beyond Simon’s Town is Boulders Beach, famous for the colony of African penguins that lives there. It was raining as we parked up, but, by the time we reached the beach, it had stopped again, and we were able to get some good photos of the penguins. We didn’t get as close to them as we did at Betty’s Bay, but because they were on sand, rather than in shrubbery, we were able to see them better, especially the nesting and nursery areas. It was interesting to see the young penguins at different stages of their development, from those fully covered in fur, to those who had shed most of it and were left with what looked like a furry scarf around their necks!

    We spent some time watching their antics on the beach and in the water before heading to the Seaforth Restaurant for lunch. I had fish and chips, and Mark had a seafood platter for one, which was huge! We sat with a Brazilian couple who have been living near Pretoria for the past year. His work contract is almost up, so they thought they better explore a bit of South Africa before returning home. They had no idea it would be so much colder here in Cape Town than it is in Pretoria!    Read more

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