30 Jan 2009 – Muizenberg

The overhead light in the main room of the pool house has been out for almost a week, and it’s beginning to get on our nerves. On any given day, there are plenty of things that require fixing at 10 Loch Rd – the front gate, the oven, the pool filter – but the burnt out light bulbs have been the worst. For five nights we’ve cooked dinner in the dark, cleaned the dishes in the dark, tried to find our food in the over-stuffed fridge in the dark, and gathered to try on clothes and prepare for nights out… in the dark. The landlord has stopped by a few times a week to check up on projects around the house, but he’s yet to address the overhead light (and a number of others in some bedrooms). So to finish off this little rant… I write tonight from the perpetual darkness of the pool house main room.

On to more interesting topics:

On Thursday we had an abbreviated class day because of some rescheduled classes, so most people took advantage of the free morning and ran errands to grocery and book stores around Rondebosch and Cape Town. We had class in the evening, sitting around Marita’s living room, again, discussing our creativity/problem-solving profiles and eating a delicious dinner (a.k.a. a “McComiskey special”) and dessert.

Thursday night most of the house went out, so Friday morning was a languid affair. Once we organized ourselves around noon, eight people headed for the city and the other seven of us walked to the train station near Main Rd. to travel up to Muizenberg Beach. Some of the group had been to Muizenberg last Friday (the day of the shark-sighting) and they helped the rest of us navigate buying tickets, finding the proper train car, and getting off at the right stop. The 35-minute ride was only 11 Rand, or just over a dollar, and when we hopped off the train a half hour later, the beach stretched out endlessly ahead of us.

You’d expect that, by now, we’d be accustomed to the breathtaking landscapes that seem to greet us at every new place we visit. But our frenzied rush to the water’s edge would suggest otherwise.

The flat plane of the beach extended out into the choppy surf, which transitioned from bright turquoise to dark blue between the rows and rows of white-crested waves. The slope of the beach was so moderate that swimmers could walk out quite far into the warm (for the southern Atlantic, anyway) water. Surfers perched on their boards a hundred meters out, clustered in groups of friends, novices, beach bums, and old pros, as the wind whipped the sand around us on the broad expanse of beach. (The brisk gusts kept the beach relatively empty during the afternoon, and eventually drove us back to the train a little after 4PM.)

Our time at Muizenberg was characterized by several interesting events, the first of which occurred as we were walking to find a good spot along the beach to settle down. By a group of beach huts, we passed a group of three boys chasing after a crippled bird, which hopped helplessly away from them through the sand. With several animal lovers in the group, we could hardly stand to watch them dive on the defenseless animal and pin it to the ground.

We watched in horror for a few moments before one member of our group had the tenacity to approach the boys – none of which could have been older than ten or eleven – and insist that they leave the poor animal alone. Apparently one of the boys was clever enough to see the request as money-making opportunity and insisted that they would kill the bird if we didn’t hand over 5 Rand, right there. We tried to talk them out of the scheme, but ultimately I handed over the equivalent of 50 cents and they ran off down the beach wearing mischievous grins. While we weren’t happy with how we’d settled the matter, we were glad to have the injured bird in hand, and so faced the next hurdle – figuring out what to do with a broken-winged bird on an isolated beach in South Africa. Two highly-invested members of the group took on the task of locating a veterinary hospital, calling a cab, and driving the bird in, during the next hour. But unfortunately there’d been no choice but to have the animal euthanized. The students later returned to spend the rest of the afternoon in the waves and sand, but the avian-intervention remained a sore subject until long after we returned home that night.

Meanwhile, three of us chose to rent surfboards from a surf shop across the street and try our luck at surfing without any lessons. The rental rate for a board and wetsuit was just 100 Rand – or $10 – for the first hour, and R160 for two hours, so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. We struggled into the awkward suits and then lugged the long, bulky boards across the street to the water. Even as the wind transformed the upright boards into sails and nearly toppled us over, we stopped to take a few pictures on the beach before hitting the water. The next two hours were an exhilarating (and at times frustrating) rush of pounding waves and mouthfuls of seawater, figuring out the technique and scrambling to catch waves as they started to break. Of the three of us, Kevin was most successful, riding a number of long waves all the way into the beach. I managed a few solid rides once I figured out how to get up on the board, but after an hour and a half I began to tire of the endless paddling and heaving of the big board through crashing surf. After one last successful ride into the beach, we collapsed by our towels, feeling a mix of fatigue and triumph. The wind had picked up even more during the afternoon, so carrying the boards back across the street to the surf shop was a comic procedure that involved a lot of tilting and bracing and bumping into things. After a brief snack, the wind

simply grew too uncomfortable, and we packed up to head back to the train platform.

On the way back we encountered a young man with a guitar propped on his shoulder, and as I have been in search of one myself, since we arrived in Cape Town, I mustered a bit of courage and approached him to find out if he knew where I might be able to find a musical instrument shop near Cape Town. Though he couldn’t recommend any specific places, he was still very friendly and interested in hearing about our time and reasons for being in South Africa.

We stopped in a tiny ice cream shop before catching the train back to Rondebosch, and then trudged home from Main Rd., exhausted from the day in the waves, and ready for dinner and a good shower.