After work, we took the minibus back to Rondebosch and split the evening between running around the Commons, making omelets for dinner, and watching two recent episodes of House that Hilary had brought from home. The internet has been finicky, lately, so our attempts to check email and Skype were largely unsuccessful. Instead, much of the house spent the evening working on papers and talking about various events from the past weekend. Six people had spent Sunday shark diving a couple of hours outside of Cape Town, and their descriptions of the safety cage and the sharks that swam within a few feet of them made the expensive activity seem more than worthwhile.
Monday and Tuesday were two of the coolest days that we’ve experienced in Cape Town, and on Monday there was even an hour or so of steady, light rain. Though some of the group has become spoiled by the dry, warm days of South African summer, I found the change in atmosphere long overdue, and I embraced the relative chill during my brisk run with Hilary on Monday evening. Without consulting a thermometer, I can only guess that the nights have dipped into the fifties (Fahrenheit), recently, and we’ve had to don long sleeves and socks to stay comfortable as we shuffle between the main house and the pool house after dark. Of course, the wind continues to whip through the windows and slam the heavy doors inside the house, regardless of the weather.
I’d arranged to take Tuesday and Wednesday off from Black Sash so that Hilary and I could spend the last days of her visit seeing more of Cape Town. So after finishing up a paper on Tuesday morning, we set off for Main Rd. to pick up bottled water and an iced Choccochino Crush from Cocoa Wa-Wa before catching the train to Simons Town, a charming little village at the far edge of False Bay, about an hour’s ride from Rondebosch. When the train stopped in Fish Hoek, however, we were ushered off to the front of the station, where a coach bus was waiting to take us the rest of the way to our destination. Like so often happens in South Africa, we never found an explanation for why we’d suddenly had to switch modes of transportation.
At the station in Simons Town we consulted a large area map to find our way to the penguin colony at Boulder Beach, our ultimate destination for the afternoon. The tourist hot spot happened to be over a mile down the coastal road, so we set off with the intent of taking our time and peaking in some of the little curio shops we passed along the way. The single road snaked along the coast, squeezing between the mountains and the ocean, and the area was rich with historic architecture, having first been settled by the Dutch East India Company in the late 1770s.
We scanned the trinkets at the market near Boulders and then bought our tickets to the board walk into the penguin colony, where we spent the next half hour watching the strikingly colored land birds waddle, dig, and preen along their protected, grassy sand dunes. Just as they did the first time I visited during orientation week, the smooth, white boulders that sat at the edges of the beach looked as if they’d been craftily carved out of hunks of granite and then dropped at random on the shore. The penguins bobbed about or sunned themselves out on the white sand, entirely unfazed by the groups of tourists fawning over them a few feet away.
In the late afternoon we took the long walk back to the train station (stopping quickly for Magnum bars on the way), and once back in Rondebosch, grabbed an early dinner at Wimpy’s diner on Main Rd. Back at the house, we discovered the electricity in the Common Room had gone out – as it had once before – so the internet was down and the room was essentially unusable after dark. Jordan and I spent about an hour running around the house connecting and disconnecting wires related to the phone, internet, and power outlets. In the process of hunting down an extension cord, we found a way to open the mysterious door under the stairs, where we found a very odd assortment of objects and absolutely nothing useful for helping us with the power situation. After a long time sitting cross-legged on the floor of the upstairs hall, surrounded by wires, plugs, and the internet router, we finally found a combination of connections that revived our wireless connection. The house rejoiced.We had a house meeting scheduled for 8:00, and a few of us watched old episodes of The Office on iTunes while waiting for the whole group to convene in the Mandela Suite (as the Common Room was out of commission). The meeting was especially light given the fast-approaching academic excursion to Durban, and most of the discussion centered on our itinerary and preparations for the trip. After the meeting, Ben and Marita remained at the house as Marita met with individuals who’d yet to have their one-on-one meetings with her over the weekend, and both Dan’s father and Hannah’s father – each visiting for a week or two – stopped in for a while, as well.
But the most interesting news of the night came around 9:30, when several people came rushing into the house shouting about a fire on Table Mountain. Given the hot, dry South African climate and the types of vegetation on the mountains, fires around Cape Town are anything but unusual at this time of year. But over the course of the evening, the red flames that first smoldered in a small area near the Rhodes Memorial by UCT blew north with the wind, and soon they encompassed an entire side of the mountain. We ran back and forth between the Commons and the house three or four times before midnight, watching the mountain blaze and the thick gray smoke sift off over toward the city. The yellow-orange flames licked at the night sky, silhouetting a single line of trees that stood dark and ghostly at the base of the mountain by Groote Shur Hospital on the far north slope of the mountain.
The sirens and flashing lights that blinked through the smoke around the edges of the fire appeared ineffective at containing it, and after a few hours, it became clear that this was no ordinary mountain fire. Several people who’d gone out to the city for St. Patrick’s Day evening had to find a new way home after they had to close the N2, the highway that circles the base of the mountain and connects the city to the southern suburbs. Even as I write, the fire continues to rage up the mountain and toward the Cape Town slope, with no sign of stopping. The extent of fire, I suppose, will only be seen tomorrow morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment