16 Mar 2009 – Assuming the Role of South African Tour Guide

On Friday afternoon I took a metered cab to the airport about twenty minutes away. Though we hit rush hour traffic on the highway, I arrived at the international terminal just after 4:30PM, when Hilary’s flight was scheduled to land. I remembered the airport enough from the night we flew in that I didn’t need to ask for directions getting to the arrivals area, and I checked the flight status one last time in the terminal lobby when I hurried in the door. Family members searched for familiar faces amidst the stream of weary travelers appearing from behind the terminal's sliding door, and a number of men in business suits held name signs by the crowd partition.

I took my place right across from the door through which travelers were exiting and turned on my iPod as I waited. Watching the expressive greetings and emotional reunions of the dozens of people passing through the sliding doors, I couldn’t help but flip to the Beach Boys’ song God Only Knows. The song played during the final scene of the movie Love, Actually, as characters reunited with their loved ones in an airport, and the novelty of recreating that scene entertained me until Hilary appeared.

We spent the whole cab ride back to Rondebosch catching up on her flight, which had been slightly shorter than ours (because she flew through Dakar, Senegal rather than Amsterdam) but had required her to stay on the same plane for 18 hours straight. I found myself talking a mile a minute the entire afternoon as we settled all of her stuff into my room at 10 Loch Rd and introduced her to everyone in the house. Just before dinner we walked to Main Rd (via the Commons) to pick up groceries at Checkers, and I continued to ramble on and on about everything we passed. We spent the rest of the evening catching up on the last two months, making and eating dinner, and in my case, reading through some of the magazines Hilary had brought from home.

Saturday morning we trekked across the Commons again a little before 9AM for a meeting I had previously scheduled with Marita. At least twice during the term we each have one-on-ones with our professor to discuss the internships, classes, and life in Cape Town in general. We left to meet Michelle and Emily A at the

train station near Main Rd at 10:00, having shifted our activist project from Friday to Saturday.

We rode into Fish Hoek by train, then took a minibus to Lekker Water Rd. and walked into the busier-than-usual TEARS compound. The weekend morning had brought in several potential animal adopters and a group of children from a local primary school on a class trip. Once we’d taken Hilary through a brief tour and introduction, we jumped into dog walking and joined a few other Saturday volunteers on the quiet industrial road.

Around 12:30, we walked the block to Masiphumelele to find the minibus back to Fish Hoek, and as I’d hoped, Hilary got a ten-minute tour of the township as we rolled through, picking up other taxi riders. The streets between the colorful shacks were bursting with activity, which was quite unlike the subdued Friday atmosphere we’ve previously encountered there. Meat fried on a braai by the roadside, the salons and

shabeens (small convenience shops often run out of peoples’ homes) were hubs of activity, and children ran barefoot after soccer balls and old tires on the dusty side streets. It was a great opportunity for all of us to see the weekend activity in the township.

As we’ve done a few times before, we got off the train in Muizenberg on the way home and spent about two hours on the beach. Hilary and I immediately rented surf boards and wetsuits from Gary’s Surf Shop and hit the waves. The relentless wind made the choppy waves even more erratic than usual, so we struggled just to get out to the breaking point, but eventually, each of us got up on our boards a few times to ride a wave in to shore. Hilary – whose always had better balance than I – picked up the technique right away, and if it weren’t for the energy-sapping wind and waves, I probably would have had to drag her from the water at the end of the afternoon.

We rinsed off in the outdoor shower after returning our suits and boards (just $10 each for the time we spent on the water) and then grabbed cones at Muizenberg’s delicious ice cream shop before catching the train the rest of the way back to Rondebosch. When we got back to the house, we were both exhausted and chose to spend the rest of the time before dinner taking a nap and watching some of the recent episodes of The Office that had been copied off the DVR from home. After dinner we waffled over going ice skating with a few people from Cape Town, but opted out of the activity because it was likely to last until at least 1AM, and a separate taxi home would have been pricey. Ice skating, after all, was a bit too reminiscent of the New England climate Hilary had just left.

On Sunday morning, Hilary and I ran a lap around the Commons and ended at Woolworth’s to get a few more items, particularly a big bottle of water. The water in Cape Town has a very distinct taste, which might not be too dissimilar to Connecticut well water but certainly differs from the town water we drink at home. In the first few weeks here, I’d assumed I would never get used to it and would have to buy bottled water everyday for four months, but thankfully, I adjusted to the taste as time went on and now rarely have a problem with it. In the beginning, some of us started a system to gauge the daily acridity level of the pool house tap water using a modified version of the Bush Administration’s color-coded terror threat system. Yellow days were only moderately distasteful, while red days we kept our glasses away from the faucet altogether. Today we’re unlikely to describe the water as anything worse than a level green or yellow, but during Hilary’s brief stay, she’ll probably be sticking with bottled water.

Sunday afternoon Emily A, Hilary, and I took a minibus taxi into Cape Town with the intention of doing a bit of sight-seeing and then hiking Lion’s Head again to see the sunset. While we were walking around the eerily quiet downtown (the city is exceptionally empty on Sunday afternoons), we picked up on an unusual vibe as we rounded a corner. A block later we stumbled upon a film shoot and immediately changed course so that we could (nonchalantly) stroll past. Given the recent star-sighting in Rondebosch, we inevitably jumped to conclusions and had our eyes peeled for Morgan Freeman or Matt Damon, but once we passed the lighting screens and camera equipment we found a pair of shiny black sedans and realized it was merely a car commercial.

We wandered up the street to the Company’s Garden, a gorgeous green park running through the center of the city behind Parliament. We branched off the cobblestoned walk and into the actual gardens, which contain hundreds of indigenous African flora, and then stumbled across a quaint café at the edge of the property, where we sat down for an early dinner. The light chatter of a wedding reception on the lawn nearby and several intrepid squirrels at our feet kept us occupied during the meal.

Around 5:15 we began walking southwest through the city towards Table Mountain and Lion’s Head, which encase the metro on two sides like a bowl. Lion’s Head poked out behind the buildings, a distant, brown-rock silhouette, so when we began our walk we hardly expected to reach the base of the mountain by foot. By 6:00, however, we'd covered quite a distance and were faced with the decision of either calling a cab for a five minute ride or hiking up the steep, winding road to the base of the trail on our own. Our physical energy, we decided, was more expendable than our cash, so we chose a variation of option two: we created our own path through the brush at the base of the mountain, and fought our way through prickly shrubs up the rocky, uneven mountainside. Twenty minutes later we came crashing out of the brush onto a vacant dirt maintenance road, knowing we’d overcome some very difficult odds. The rest of the hike would only prove a further test of our endurance.

This second hike to the summit of Lion’s Head proceeded much like the first, except that it required a bit more coaxing and reassuring on my part, since my climbing partners weren’t quite as gung-ho as the ones I'd climbed with the first time. The hour and a half of climbing to the trail base also put a damper on our energy for the difficult ascent. When we reached the chain-assisted climbs, the sun – which was out of view on the Western side of the mountain – had already flushed the Twelve Apostles red, and we scrambled to the “brow” of Lion’s Head just moments after the sun had sunk beneath the watery horizon. Nevertheless, we pushed on to the peak, utterly exhausted and nursing a few bumps and scrapes. The final rock climb to the top was just as surreal as the first time we’d done it, with the pinkish hues of twilight casting dramatic shadows across the craggy rock face and an ever-darkening eastern sky.

We had time for just a few pictures and a quick snack when we reached the top, which was much less crowded than it had been on the full moon. We noticed with a bit of anxiety that the moon was no where to be found as we began our descent, so we made haste (at least as much as possible on the tricky mountain trail) down the “recommended route”, avoiding the rope chains in the dark. Ever vigilant of potential muggers, we kept our flashlight trained on the surrounding mountainside, and as we circled around to the western side of the mountain, we soaked up the view of the stars over the ocean and the sound of the thunderous surf crashing far below.

We called a cab as we neared the bottom, and reached the end of the trail around 8:15. After a few minutes of catching our breath on the curbside, the cab arrived to whisk us back along the sleepy N2 to Rondebosch.