South Africa - Without Bikes
We arrived in Cape Town. I love this city, one on my favorites. I spent two months traveling Southern Africa with a bunch of Irish degenerates (you know who you are) eighteen years ago...and I loved it. Great country. The Rainbow nation, eleven official languages, diversity, culture, and a fantastic history, some of it terrible some of it wonderful.
We booked a fancy apartment for a week on the edge of the Bo-Kapp neighborhood with its brightly colored houses on cobbled narrow streets. It used to be called the Malay Quarter and is currently mostly Muslim however much like many in demand neighborhoods the demographics are changing quickly. We spent the week doing all the museums, beaches, piano bars, restaurants, bicycle tours and we visited the V&A Waterfront, Robben Island, climbed Table mountain and Lions Head… All the good things.. This city is too much fun. The selection of restaurants here is fantastic and what with the currency favorability they are very cheap for us. Something that Cape Tonians are quick to point out “oooh! this must be cheap for you what with the rand to dollar!” I mumble “yes” through a mouth full of caviar. Sorry for your troubles but we are going to five star it every night! Cape Malay, Indian, African and European phenomenal food.
It’s hard to talk about South Africa without talking about the Apartheid regime, what led to it and the repercussions of those policies which continue to this day. It is an ever present component of the story of South Africa. However, I’m not going to get into it here today… I wouldn’t do it justice. But everywhere you go in Cape Town people tell you stories from those times, from the pencil test which was a method of assessing how black you were which was adjudicated by men who stuck a pencil in your hair, to the story of District Six which was torn apart and its inhabitants were evicted because they were diverse and mixed races and the governing regime wanted to possess the land, to the stories of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who used his Cathedral as a sanctuary for those who were being abused and oppressed. It’s a fascinating, sad and at times life inspiring story of how a People can rise up and shatter the shackles of slavery and servitude. There are many fantastic films and books to be read about it which can tell the story much better than I.
We got word from the shipping company in New York that there was a problem with the paperwork for the bikes. They were supposed to arrive one week after ourselves, which would have given us a nice amount of time to acclimatize and see the sights of Cape Town before hitting the road. Unfortunately the shippers kept on getting our hopes up before telling us of more delays. It took a month for our bikes to arrive. I won’t bore you with the details, but first problem was with the title of my bike, the second was a delay with Americans customs clearing our bikes (no idea why, no explanation given) then they had problems with flight scheduling, the bikes missed two separate cargo flights through Emirates. All super frustrating but out of our control. I have learnt to not get too annoyed in these situations, we were stuck and forced to wait but wait in a place that I love.
And so with all this extra time to kill we rented a car twice in Cape Town to explore around the Cape, Stellenbosch and the wine country and also we flew to Johannesburg for a week to see Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Johannesburg had changed a lot since I was there before. We stayed in the Artsy neighborhood of Maboneng and visited Soweto, Mandela’s house and the Hector Pieterson Museum which tells the story of the Soweto Student rising in the 70’s. The stories are heartbreaking and it is hard to get through the exhibits without tearing up. The museum itself is named after a twelve year old boy who was shot by the police during the uprising and whose image was subsequently printed on papers around the world. The Apartheid Museum is also fantastic, lots of really good exhibits.
And also worth a mention is the serene and beautiful Freedom Park in Pretoria which commemorates all of the lives lost in the Nation’s struggles.
In total we rented four separate apartments in Cape Town. As we would leave and come back each time we thought our bikes were coming. In a way it was nice as we got to experience four completely different parts of the city, the Muslim quarter, the upcoming artist neighborhood, the seafront and the fancy rich people’s neighborhood. In total it took a month for the bikes to finally arrive and once they did they zipped through South African Customs without a hitch! (Get it together American customs!) And once we got the word they had landed we were ecstatic. Off we raced to pick them up from the cargo warehouse…
