Cape Town

Chris and I fly to Capetown for a few days. Capetown--The Jewel of Africa. In other words, it's all down hill from here.

It seems like a Caribbean town, influenced by the first world, economically attached to it, and yet not fully participating in it. You wouldn't be surprised to see pirates or ne'er-do-wells around the corner. Think Key West, Gibraltar, an updated version of Tortuga as presented in Pirates of the Caribbean. The people here can't decide if they want to get ahead, or if they just want to relax and enjoy life. To do both at the same time, they find new and innovative ways to steal from tourists.

The Strand is only a few blocks from the hotel. It's one of the main areas with restaurants and bars along the road. Even on a Monday night the bars are full around midnight until 3 in the morning.

We drive south from Capetown towards the Cape of Good Hope. Beautiful scenery, waves crashing into rocks that soon climb into mountains. Earthy Mediterranean feel. Lunch along the water, view of the rocks, old Dutch guys drinking beer.

Johannesburg feels like the New York of Africa. Capetown is the Amsterdam of Africa.

Along the drive they have a penguin sanctuary. You can see the penguins up close, and they have a beach where you can swim with the penguins. The penguins usually steer clear of where the people swim, but they sit on the rocks nearby. Occasionally you'll see a penguin swimming past people, much faster than a human could follow.

Penguin lust.

We drive down to the Cape of Good Hope, the south-westernmost tip of Africa. No, it's not the southernmost tip. That is called Cape Agulhas, about 100km away, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans meet. Look on a map. But this cape, the Cape of Good Hope, is what the sailors of old worried about, where they began the dangerous passage across the southern tip of Africa. The wind is strong and gusty. Wild baboons and ostriches are in the preserve along the road.

Drive back along the western side of the cape peninsula. It's mountainous. Think "Lord of the Rings".

We get a late dinner and get out late. We go to one place with mostly local people, and talk to a woman with a wonderful laugh. She doesn't appear South African to me, so I ask where she is from. She finds the question funny, and says that she IS from South Africa, and she is "colored". I am a little confused by the term. South Africans still conventionally group themselves & other by the racial groups defined during the Apartheid regime: white, black, Indian, and "colored". Colored meant any mixture of any group, but was and still is looked down on by many white South Africans. She said she was actually primarily of Malay descent; Most Americans would probably call her white, although maybe guess that she was Spanish or European. The racial groupings that many people use, including the ones that we use in America, are somewhat arbitrary and confusing, but they can influence our self-identity, and how we perceive others.

Later, much too late, we meet another woman at a wonderful Irish pub who is South African, of Xhosa & Namibian descent. Wonderful to talk to, smart and well-read. Since it's so late we suggest meeting for dinner the next night.

The next day Chris and I go to "table mountain", the small mountain near Cape Town with a relatively flat top. We take the cable car to the top. It's largely shrouded by clouds today, but you can sometimes see Cape Town below you through the clouds. When we're ready to leave they say the cable car has a problem, and we'll have to wait until they fix it. About 45 minutes later it's working again and we board, then get stuck about 1/3rd of the way down. Chris notices that the "high wind danger" lights are blinking on the control panel. They take us part of the way back up, then finally fix the problem and take us all the way to the bottom.

We meet Sharon, the Xhosa/Namibian woman, out for dinner much later than we were supposed to. She is originally from Cape Town, but she's been living in Namibia for the last year. She flew back to Cape Town for a few days to visit family. Chris is tired after dinner and goes back to the hotel. Sharon and I go to a bar called "Mama Africa" with a wonderful live African drum band that everybody is dancing to. That bar closes early for Cape Town, but the group of people we're with want to go to a dance club that is open later called FTV.

FTV is the LA scene of Cape Town. All of the beautiful people are there, dressed to kill. Crowded dancing to club music, bottle service at roped off tables, several groups at the bar have bottles of champagne in coolers. We're dancing and having fun, but it's getting late. The club is hitting it's peak, but I'm tired and thinking I will leave soon. One of the girls in our group gets in some argument with some other girl there. One or two people from our group intervene to separate them, and Sharon tries to calm each of the two girls down. The two girls, and a friend of their's on each side are still being aggressive. I position myself to help separate the two groups, but Sharon grabs me and pushes me out of the way. She doesn't say anything to me, but the message is clear: You're not from here, you don't know how things work here, stay out of the way.

Sharon has largely succeeded in calming down the two groups, and we warily return to dancing. A few minutes later, the two girls start up again. Sharon is trying to calm them down again; I'm standing back and to the side; A few of the other guys are standing close in, ready to intervene if they start pushing and shoving again. A minute or two pass with some angry words on both sides. I can't hear what any of them are saying, but I assume that Sharon is being successful again in reducing the tension.

Then one of the girls leaps at the other girl, purposefully smashing her champagne flute on the other girl's head. Within a second the two girls are locked in vicious combat. I spend a quarter of a second trying to decide if I should try to stop them; I decide I should try to pull one of them away. One of the other guys is trying to grab one of them, and he falls into me, pushing me out of the way before I can act. I later realize that this is probably good for me. One huge bouncer rushes in and is trying to separate them and pushing them towards the door. One girl is holding tightly and pulling on the other girls hair, while the other girl is thrashing wildly at her with the broken champagne flute. The bouncer and another door guy carry the girls out the nearby door, trying but unable to separate them.

It's about 5 seconds since the altercation started. There is blood and broken glass on the bar and floor. The bartenders tell me and others to stand back while they wipe the blood and glass off the bar. It's so loud and dark in there that most people in the club didn't even realize anything happened. Sharon hands me her purse and jacket, and another girl's, and tells me to stay there while she and another girl and one of the guys go outside.

Ten minutes pass. I'm holding two purses and two girls jackets plus my own. A group of guys eagerly come up to talk to me. They think I am one of the star players on the South African rugby team. Apparently I look like him, or he looks like me. I try to tell them that I'm not him, but they don't believe me, or they're too drunk to understand my denial. They congratulate me and tell me how great I am for a few minutes, then leave me alone.

Sharon and the other girl finally come back in. The club manager hadn't wanted them to come back in, but Sharon bribed one of the bouncers to let her back in. Sharon is visibly shaken and upset. The girl who got attacked had lacerations on her forehead and both of her cheeks. She had reduced the bleeding with a towel, then got in her car and drove off by herself. The other girl, the one wielding the champagne flute, had left in a taxi. Didn't the club call an ambulance, and the police, and hold the girls there? No; Sharon says they would have if the girls were white, but they don't want to get involved in black-on-black violence. The club just wants the situation to go away. Neither of them will get in there again, but that's about the extent of enforcement.