11 Mar 2009 – Hosting Dinners and Moonrise from Lion’s Head

We launched into Monday morning less than twelve hours after stepping off of the van from Plettenberg, and the pace of the weekend has not slowed, since then. After our internships on Monday, most people had to go food shopping, and we’d arranged to have Vernon over for dinner to make up for the class we’d missed last Thursday. We had tried to arrange a plan for buying and preparing the food for the communal meal while on the road back to Cape Town the previous night, but between 4 and 7PM on Monday, the main house kitchen was a frantic rush of activity. About half of the house had some direct hand in the purchasing and preparation of the meal, which included meat and vegetarian options for the main course of sautéed sausage, peppers, and other vegetables, baked potatoes, rice, and side salad.

The dinner had come together surprisingly well by the time Vernon and Marita arrived at the front gate. We scrounged up silverware from the pool house kitchen and all convened in the dining room to eat and discuss our newest class assignment. The night would not have been complete without the reiteration of the weekend’s most interesting moments, however, so there was much reenacting and recounting of funny and dramatic moments from the Garden Route.

Tuesday marked the second to last full moon of our time in Cape Town, so we had planned a trip to the local’s favorite moon-viewing spot, Lion’s Head Mountain. Every month on the full moon, hordes of Capetonians climb the jutting mountain peak to watch the sunset over the Atlantic and the moonrise over the city of Cape Town. Lion’s Head sits between Signal Hill and Table Mountain, and as the pictures show, the peak itself is a bare, narrow wall of rock that from certain angles resembles the profile of one of Africa’s “Big 5” animals. Through their activist project, several members of our group have become friends with a young man Khayelitsha, and he helped to organize our transportation to the base of the mountain at 6PM. We’d been

prepared to ride in the back of a pick-up truck – since that is what we’d been told to expect – but just before 6, a van like the one we’d taken to Plettenberg rolled up outside our front gate. The eleven of us who’d opted to do the hike hopped in the van for the twenty minute trip into the city, where the driver dropped us at the bottom of the steep, wide trail up the mountain.

The sky was already turning pink as we began the ascent, so we took off quickly, in hopes of catching the sunset on the Western side of the mountain. The dirt trail wound once around the mountain before narrowing into a tricky, hand-and-foot rock climb for the second half of the hike. The twilight shades and shadows on Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles were breathtaking as we rounded the southern face of Lion’s Head, but we were moving at such a fast clip that we were splitting into smaller groups as we hiked. Clusters of other hikers also on their way to the top began to separate our group, and we wound up taking separate paths towards the peak. Three continued on the “recommended route” (the most gradual and lengthy path, ending at a slightly lower peak) and eight of us took a narrow trail that zigzagged up the eastern face of the cliff at a disorienting angle. The view at our backs was the sprawling city bowl, the moon rising over the clouded mountain range at the far edge of the cape, and the hulking shadow of Table Mountain. Kevin, Dan, and I scrambled up the mountain as fast as we could, trying to reach the top before sunset, but the rope chains and bouldering were a little too exciting (and dangerous) to speed through.

When we reached the “nose” of the lion, we got our first glimpse of the sun hovering over the sea, poised to sink beneath a broiling layer of orange-yellow clouds that rippled just over the water on the horizon. The ridge to the top of the head required us to climb a steep strip of rocks so narrow that it reminded me of Knife Edge on Mount Katahdin in Maine. The 360 panorama as we reached the approached the top was simply overwhelming. Below us to the south stood Table Mountain, with Camps bay lying just beneath the reddish peaks of the Twelve Apostles. To the west stretched the vast expanse of ocean and low-hanging clouds, awash in sunset hues. To the north, the slope of the mountain arched upwards into Signal Hill, which nestled between the Waterfront, Green Point, and Bo-Kaap. And in the east rose the flat, white face of the full moon against the dark purple sky over the twinkling Cape Town metro. It didn’t matter how many times we spun around at the top – the view was impossibly beautiful. The colors! The contrast between night and day! Watching the sun melt into the Atlantic inch by inch was purely cinematic.

When we’d finally trudged up onto the small, rocky peak of the mountain, sweaty and out of breath, we were surprised by the number of people already lounging on the cliffs facing west. At least a hundred people – most wearing clothes that wouldn’t seem conducive to a technical climb – sat in groups either chatting or snacking, all bathed in the surreal orange light. We took countless photos in each direction off the peak, lingering on the sunset for the next fifteen minutes, until the yellow orb had shivered its last shred of light over the ocean.

Though the western sky continued to resemble an oil painting, we devoted the next hour to surveying the moonrise, as other members of our group joined us. In the end, eight of us gathered on the eastern face of the peak and watched the sprinkling of city lights multiply under the ever-darkening sky. Clouds were moving in over the distant mountains, and the lights they partially obscured seemed to flicker and dance in the darkness. We stayed at the peak until long after dark, realizing around 8:30 that we still had at least an hour and a half’s climb down before we could drive back to Rondebosch.

The climb down was admittedly treacherous by moonlight – even full-moonlight – and certainly nothing any of us could imagine being able to do in the United States. While scooting down the rock ledges in the darkness, I repeatedly turned to look back up at the cliffs behind me to see the seven other shadow figures moving slowly downwards against the starry night sky. The camera simply couldn’t capture the scene.

We made it down the chain ropes and rock scrambles with the gracious help of a Capetonian couple wearing headlamps. And despite one person’s twisted ankle, we reached the bottom of the path around 9:45. Our van and driver were waiting for us by the side of the road when we arrived, so we returned to the house just after 10 o’clock, feeling both accomplished and fortunate to have been able to see such a rare and stunning natural event.