Cape Town Pt 1 - City by the sea

You can easily spend two or three days in Cape Town city alone - ascend the revolving cable car of Table Mountain by day (and Signal Mountain by evening or night) for an idea both of the city's size and its ocean-side orientation and a walk through the fynbos and views of the Lion's Head; mosey around the Victoria and Alfred (the Queen's second son, who tipped the first load of stone into the sea to initiate construction of the harbour) development on the waterfront with its world-class aquarium, shopping facilities and huge variety of restaurants, as well as historical connections; visit Company's Gardens with the Parliament Building (CT is teh country's legislative capital) or St George's Cathedral or the excellent museum-cum-stately home within the castle; or take a more humbling trip to Robben Island (overcrowded in these days of Mandela-worship, but nonetheless worthwhile) or perhaps a guided tour into the Cape Flats...and this is all before you head out of CT proper into the winelands and around the coastline.

Quick Tips:

Keep an eye on Table Mountain for a likely clearing in the cloudy "tablecloth" -- views come and go and it's no fun if you pick unwisely. You can hike up to the top for free, but the revolving cable car (though pricey at 105Rpp return) is an experience.

Cape roads and attactions get crowded at weekends -- apparently peak summertime traffic stretches for hours. Also true of Hermanus/the penguin haunts of Boulders' Beach.

V&A is CT’s pickpocket hotspot -- keep safety concerns in mind but don't get hysterical about it. Avoid public buses and dark streets, take care on arrival not to drive inadvertently into the Cape Flats near the airport; don't stop the car unnecessarily on highways, or hitch-hike.

If you don't fancy staying in Cape Town itself, there's a good selection of B&Bs along the west coast in Hout Bay or Clifton, where you get a great view of the twelve Apostles and access to splendid beaches.

The classic picture postcard/photo opportunity of Table Mountain is NW, from BloubergStrand. On a lovely beach, paddle in Antarctic-cold water while watching wetsuited parakiters bump across the waves.

Best Way To Get Around:

Scaremongerers warn that driving in CT is nightmarish and parking worse; it’s not that bad -- there are decent carparks (some with guards) at Signal Hill, etc., and parking meters, attended by helpful traffic police, on the streets by Companys Gardens (6R per 30 mins). Overnight though, check that your hotel has off-street, secure facilities (may cost more but likely to be worthwhile given the level of nighttime car-crime).

At the airport (15 miles/24km), there are car rental agencies or you can come into town via taxi/public transport. Taxis cost cR180; 20-30 mins. Apparenly, airport shuttle buses leave every 30 mins for the train station, SAA city terminal and major hotels for R15 but aren’t always reliable.

Once in town, getting around by public transport is also hard work -- avoid the packed buses, instead spread your Rand by taking taxis -- but remember that some buy up knackered bangers and hawk themselves as taxis (in uninsured death-traps). It sounds a touristy cop-out, but get a hotel to order a cab rather than jumping into one ad hoc on the street. An average trip - say V&A to the castle - should cost about 30-35R.

Reasonably priced accommodation in Cape Town can be hard to track down, particularly in the V&A area. The hotels are mainly aimed at tour groups or business travellers – the Breakwater is therefore something of a find. Formerly a 19th-century prison and now owned by the University of Cape Town and operated by Protea Hotels as part of the Graduate School of Business (hence the sometime campus feel to it), it is not flashy or luxurious, but it’s extremely well-priced and well-placed, within striking distance of the Central Business District (though the guidebooks caution against walking too far in that direction, as muggings have apparently taken place) and for all the restaurants and amenities of the V&A.

Our room was, at R375 without breakfast, quite small but clean and provided with a small TV and towels, etc. Facilities are shared with one other room (through your numbered door off the utilitarian corridor, you’re faced with four doors – your room, the loo, the shower-room and your neighbours’ room) but you have your own fan and it’s all pretty quiet. (Rooms with en private suites are available but booked up early and slightly more expensive). Breakfast is (a fairly steep) R58 pp in the self-service canteen called "Stonebreakers" (which also serves lunch and dinner, as well as snacks) and, continuing the prison theme, there’s a gym called the "Treadmill." (To give you an idea of V&A hotel prices, by comparison, the (no doubt beautifully appointed and luxurious) four-star hotel right next door was charging 1800R per room.)

Whilst playing up to its history perhaps a little too much sometimes, that history is interesting…the Breakwater was a prison between 1859 (the Industrial prison extension was added in 1901) and 1926, after which date it housed black dock workers. On its establishment, it was planned that its occupants would work on construction of the breakwater in Table Bay as part of a hard labour sentence (though some workers were housed in mobile road station prisons) – rehabilitation through work was emphasised in colonial prisons in the 19th century, though blacks were seen as less able to respond to rehabilitative programmes and more likely than whites to respond to punitive treatment, and so racial segregation began in Breakwater even before it was widespread and legislated generally. This segregation defined not just punishment and work-type but also diet and place of detention; the Industrial prison was designed and built to house white convicts and thus to effect separation from black convicts.

These days the hotel’s framed pictures, carpets and curtains hide its original purpose, but occasionally you see a glimpse of its origins, like the inches-deep steel doors, and the four castellated turrets and enclosed courtyard, based on English prisons like Pentonville, for recreation.

The V&A Waterfront is jam-packed with restaurants serving all manner of types of food, including lots specialising (or claiming to specialise) in fish dishes. Touting itself as "South Africa’s premier seafood restaurant" (it has branches in Jo’burg and Durban as well in two others in CT), is Fish Market.

Unless you choose to sit outside in the courtyard, it’s quite dim, but cosy, inside (even by day), with a busy bar serving enormous glasses of wine from a fairly expansive wine list (a fine Chardonnay or Chenin blanc for 14R) or beers, etc., whilst you wait for a table (there often seems to be a queue) or a spot at the sushi conveyor. Fish comes direct from the ice on the fish counter at the left-hand side at the rear (the usual range of hapless lobsters also lurk in their tank should you be brave enough to pick one) where an impressive array of fishes and seafood are set out. Dishes run from 40-50R to abut 150R for lobster or scallops, and there are some non-piscivore chicken dishes as well.

The sushi conveyor is excellent for lunch – plates are priced according to colour (starting at 9.5R for four small cucumber or avocado Maki up to 27R for tuna sashimi). Despite your sitting up there on effectively a self-service, the waiters are attentive to how you’re doing with your wine and will happily ferry drinks from the bar, and the sushi chefs are happy to make handrolls or whatever else you fancy.

You can buy fine-looking fresh fish from the counter for take-away (hence "fish market") and also foodstuffs like soy sauce, pasta, wasabi, biscuits, sushi ginger, mirin and sake. I didn’t try enough restaurants to know if this is the "premier," but it’s certainly welcoming, well-run and good value. You can just hang around at the bar for a drink if you don’t want to eat.

Ocean Basket is a upper-market chain specialising in fish and seafood, with 20 branches in Joburg, 10 in Pretoria, 10 in the Cape, 6 in Kwa-Zulu Natal, and 13 in other spots (plus two abroad: Livingstone in Zambia and Botswana). The menus are pretty much a constant though both the service and food is somewhat variable, and the atmosphere even more so.

It bills itself as "your sole provider" and the bad puns continue as a feature throughout the wipe-clean menus and the blackboard listing ("How much you gotta shell out for da feesh?" and main courses are "Enough for da whale") – it can get a bit much, but fortunately the waiters don’t join in with the faux accent or smart-alec punch-lines.

On the upside, the food is very good indeed and pretty well priced – starters from the deli (taramasalata: R14, olives: R12) or grill (garlic mussels: R23, excellent Portuguese sardines: R22) or mains of fish and chips (R25 for a healthy portion) or "combos" of e.g. prawns and calamari (the latter is excellent and worth having on its own) for R69, platters for two (seafood platter with a little bit of everything: R129) -- everything apart from the "feesh and chips" is served with rice or chips and salad. There’s a special "linefish" each day, which is often the freshest and tastiest – rock salmon and kingklip feature. The main courses are served on large black oven dishes and all fish can be grilled or fried to taste (almost everything was tastier grilled, either Cajun or with lashings of garlic). Puddings are mediocre, shop-bought affairs, but you’re generally too full of fish to care. (One word of warning: watch out for the dips, which come unbidden, but are charged at R3 each.)

The décor is white walls and bright lights, so it's not a venue for a romantic tete-a-tete. Early on in the evenings/lunchtimes, it’s popular with families and the branches in towns like Cape Town (particularly at the V&A) and Hermanus and Stellenbosch can get busy and have considerable queues – no bookings are taken. The service is fairly brisk and, in some branches, can be brusque too. Encouragingly, all (or at least lots of) the fish is laid out on ice in the restaurant, so you can cast an eye over it before you eat it if you wish. They also do take-away (and doggy bags). The wine list is short and to the point with the local wines fairly well priced. There’s a small smoking area behind glass/Perspex.

In the early 1970s, the Capetonians wanted more extensive use of the city's historic harbour area, laid in the 1860s when Prince Alfred (Victoria's second son) symbolically tipped the first load of stone into the sea to start off construction on the port which was to bear his name -- it wasn't long before the expansion of trade routes to the East had transformed the city and discovery of gold and diamonds meant that the first section of harbour, the Alfred Basin, needed to be extended, and the Victoria Basin was added on by 1920.

The area is still notable for its outstanding heritage buildings, retaining some of the charm of its Victorian industrial architecture and giving you a feel for the scale of a harbour built for sail and the early days of steam travel.

By the 1970s, though, cargo handling and transportation alongside the re-opening of the Suez Canal and South Africa's apartheid pariah status caused a sharp downturn in the V&A's fortunes, and instead, its owners turned it into a leisure site with dozens of restaurants (some have bars for sipping outside on deck), bars, a world-class aquarium, three cinemas (including an IMAX), conferences facilities, hotels, shops; a playground of shining chrome and smiling, busy visitors. However, look carefully and you'll see there remain a few of the older signs of yesteryear...

Near to the site of the original Bertie's Landing restaurant is the Victorian Port Captain's Office (1882) with its Gothic-style Clock Tower; always an icon of the old docks, they were reworked around it so it remains a focal point in the redesigned waterfront. Look out for the second-floor mirror room, which allowed the Captain a view of all harbourside goings-on, and the ground-floor "tide-gauge." Captain Robert Wauchope's Time Ball Tower (1894), next to the Dock House where the Harbour Engineer lived, was a signalling device in which a ball dropped at a set time so that ships' masters could verify the accuracy of on-board chronometers. Next to it is the century-old, bedraggled Dragon Tree (dracaeno draco), believed to result from a seed dropped by a visitor from the Canary Islands -- it suffered badly in 2001 storms but seems to be recovering slowly.

Also next door to the red-roofed Clock Tower is the Robben Island Exhibition and Information Centre, where you buy tickets for embarkation on the catamaran for Robben Island guided tours (3.5 hrs; 150Rpp -- see entry above). (At present (Dec. 2003), there's an exhibition of Nelson Mandela's art from his Robben Island days).

Cape fur seals play In the dock waters. "Robben" means "seals" in Dutch - the island was named after them, as they often hung, and still hang, around the area, as a source of food lives there - jackass penguins! They idle around, often in pairs, performing for their own amusement -- occasionally, boatloads of oarsmen pass round the harbour and the seals tag along...

Robben Island (so-named by the Dutch after its earliest inhabitants -– "robben" means "seals" in Dutch) has a grisly, infamous history as a prison camp, initially in the days of the VOC, and more recently as South Africa’s answer to Alcatraz, to house troublesome political prisoners, most famously Nelson Mandela in Cell 5.

It was proclaimed a UN World Heritage Site in 1999 and the state now runs guided tour trips, starting at the Mandela Gateway embarkation point, every day on the hour between 9am until 3pm. There’s currently an exhibition of Mandela’s Island lithographs in the building named after him. The catamaran to the Island takes about 30 minutes and then you’re split into two groups, one of which takes a bus tour round the Island to visit its oldest sites – the lepers’ colony and graveyard and church, and the lime quarry where political prisoners mined stones (and conducted their private ANC meetings!). Accompanying each group is an ex-prisoner to give a first-hand rundown of what it was like to be incarcerated here. You’ll then swap into the care of another guide to continue on foot around the prison itself, visiting an average "cell" (one of four, each of which held about 320 men, who in the early days slept on thin mats in sardine fashion). The other group takes the Maximum Security prison first and then the bus trip round the Island.

The guides preface their talks by explaining that they are open to questions but that there are some subjects on which they can’t comment and questions they choose not to answer, but these are few and far between and they’re happy to discuss how they came to be incarcerated and their experiences inside -– undeniably, understandably, perhaps inevitably, there’s some lasting bitterness -- when you hear stories about how the authorities manipulated correspondence with the outside world and the forms of physical and psychological punishment which were meted out (now verified by confessions to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee), it’s hardly surprising and you cannot but be disgusted.

Mandela’s cell is the last "highlight," though in fact it’s identical to 100 others. The tour finishes on an upbeat note, explaining that, while Robben Island has a terrible and desperately sad history, prisoners succeeded in their demands for educational correspondence courses (ironically, their prison warders joined them in their learning) and came out knowing better how to manage South Africa’s future, and displaying photos of subsequent reunions of prisoners who are now leaders.

The tour takes about 3.5 hours and costs 150R pp. Book tickets in advance if you desperately want a specific timed tour. Don’t expect to be able to wander on your own – you’re currently kept with your tour group; however, our guide suggested that the Island is shortly going to open a hotel/conferences centre for overnight stays, which might mean some more freedom of movement lies ahead. At the ticket office and on the Island are gift shops with memorabilia.

Undoubtedly the most memorable and striking sight in Cape Town is the majestic natural wonder of Table Mountain, dominating and making a splendid backdrop from almost everywhere that you look in the city.

It’s flanked by Devil’s Peak to the east, the Lion’s Head and Signal Hill to the west, and the Karbonkelberg to the southwest. Further along are the Twelve Apostles, running south along the coast (through small beach-side suburbs like Clifton). (The best view of them is from a sailboat – there are various operators which you can book from the V&A Waterfront, like the Tigresse catamaran – (021) 425 5457.)

Table Mountain looks for all the world as though its maker has sliced off the top of the peak, hence the name the Dutch arrivals gave it -- the best view, and the classic picture postcard, is from BloubergStrand, north east along the coast from V&A, where you can get a great photo across the Atlantic Ocean (just don’t try dipping in your toe – it’s direct from the Antarctic!) of the flat top, whether it’s a clear day or the famous "tablecloth" of clouds is shimmering on the peak.

Assuming it’s not, head up on the revolving cable-car to the top (105pp return) for a cracking panorama over the city -- you can hike up (there are apparently 350 routes up, though it’s not an easy endeavour and can only be undertaken with expert advice, i.e., through the Mountain Club of South Africa or Friend’s of Lion’s Head) but the rotating cable car is quite entertaining in itself. Once at the top, the level summit is 3km long (east-west) and its highest point is 1086m (Maclear’s Beacon, which the astronomer Sir Thomas Maclear erected in 1843 as an experiment more accurately to measure the circumference of the earth) – you are asked to stick to the paths and not to feed the dassies (hydraxes) which live up there. Most entertaining is to wander along the set paths though the fynbos (literally fine bush) of local shrubby undergrowth, including species and protea. There are various birds and the occasional tortoise lurking around. Make sure you take up your binoculars for the excellent views of Cape Town below.

Signal Hill can be accessed by car and gives a good alternative view (especially of the city lights by night or of the sunset – it’s popular for locals for picnics or "sundowners"). The Lion’s Head is also a dramatic sight – it was originally the site of the cannons which announced the entry of ships into Table Bay (since moved into town).

The Castle dates from between 1666 and 1679 -- the oldest surviving building in South Africa. From 1678, it was the centre for civilian, administrative and military life in the Cape area and today remains the seat of the military (you see uniformed soldiers still walking through the courtyard) and houses an excellent museum and art collection representing the history of life in the Cape.

The castle structure is pentagonal, entered past ceremonial lions (see photo below) and under a bell tower (the bell is original, cast in Amsterdam in 1697 and weighs 670lbs), it bears the coat of arms of the United Netherlands, a crowned lion rampant holding the seven arrows of unity in its paw. Once inside, look above you for the inner gable which shows four symbols of military life -- regimental banner, mortar, drum and pyramid of cannon (see photo below).

Straight ahead is C block, which bisects the pentagon, a wall which originally was intended for internal protection. To the right is the Secunde's House (second in command at the settlement, vice governor who carried out administrative duties for the VOC after it took control in 1652 until the British took over in 1795) on three levels, with displays of furniture and artefacts from his life (look out especially for the sedan chair); the main entrance is up the staircase and onto the Kat Balcony ("Kat" is a Dutch term for a military command centre). The balcony was originally built in 1695 and rebuilt in its present form in 1786-1790 -- judicial pronouncements were made here and esteemed guests welcomed (see photo below).

Inside on two floors is the William Fehr collection (no photos allowed but they sell postcards of some of the pictures and items of furniture), an excellent trip through Cape Town's foundation and history, showing the growth and expansion of the settlement through land- and seascapes coupled with informative panels which also set the scene with extracts from contemporaneous diaries (for example, of sea captains coming into harbour or sighting the city after successfully negotiating the notorious Cape). It’s a fine way to get a feel for how and at what rate the small town grew, churches and administrative buildings and harbours were built.

On the left-hand arm of the pentagon is the military museum, which focuses on the period of the Napoleonic wars, when the VOC’s grip on Cape Town was in jeopardy after Bonaparte had invaded the Netherlands and the British sent reinforcements south to CT – historically, it’s quite interesting, again with informative panels (though the mannequins wearing various uniforms of the time may do less for you). Also in the Castle are dungeons and torture chamber, remains of a bakery, smithy, ammunition store and garrison cells, plus the Dolphin Fountain.

Entry 15R; open 9am-4pm (you can stay until about 5pm)