73. South Africa. Cape Town, Cape Peninsula, Cape Verde, Washington DC

Unfortunately, we did not quite complete our diary.  We were always a few days behind, and it appears, 32 years later, that we expected to write up the last week on the flight home, and never got around to it. In fact, since Helena had the last submission we can assume that Dan is the one that never got around to writing up the next day in Cape Town.

We do have a number of photos.  Since our days were counted we felt a little freer to take pictures. We were exclusively using slide film which was not available in most of Africa.  As I recall, we carried all of the film from the US throughout the trip, both exposed and unexposed. Finally in South Africa were able to find an additional roll.  We were not able to get the slide film developed in Africa, which meant that we took a whole year of pictures without even knowing if the camera was working properly. This is hard to imagine in the age of digital cameras where you can take pictures until your finger gets tired, or your battery runs out or until you get a picture that you like.

In any case the sequence of our final photos, and the names associated with them allow us to reconstruct those last days, mainly around the pictures themselves.

The first part of the day, the trip in from Ladismith was covered in the previous blog.  Here we resume in the city center.

Ladismith – Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday, 26 July, 1983

Dan took advantage of our being at the downtown air terminal to change our flight out of here (to Jo’burg) from Sunday to Monday.  We then went to the tourist information office to find out where the youth hostel is.  They were extremely helpful and well-informed, I’d say second only to the man in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.  The man who talked to us somehow (?) guessed that we are traveling on a low budget and had just the right information for us.  He even told us what bus would take us to the youth hostel!

We had our leftover snackwiches out of the wind in the train station (along with a glass of guava juice) and then I stayed with the packs while Dan went to the National Youth Hostel office.  The woman there knew nothing about joining, didn’t know where the Cape Town Youth Hostel was, and couldn’t say if there would be room for us there.  Back to the tourist information office!  The man was again able to help quite a bit.

The bus stop was very close by, so we struggled onto the bus (fortunately empty) and rode out to the end of the line, Kloof Nek.  Nek is Afrikaans for the saddle between two mountains, and sure enough, the end of the line was at the saddle between Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak.  We immediately saw the sign for “Stan’s Halt Youth Hostel”, but it was positioned in such a way that it could have meant one of three auto roads, or one foot path.  Luckily, an obvious co-traveler had gotten off the bus with us and he did turn out to be going go the YH.  We took the fast path through a tree-shaded park – quite a distance – and Bruce, a well-traveled New Zealander, let us through the gate to the Hostel.

Finally, we have found a really nice hostel, in fact it’s ideal.  It is housed in the old stables of Lord Somerset (whoever he was) and is in a very secluded area which overlooks the bay.  In fact the only other house visible from there (except far away by the shore) is an exclusive round restaurant housed in Lord S’s hunting lodge.

Sunset view from the youth hostel

We had a cup of tea in the kitchen with Bruce while we had the usual travelers’ conversation.  He had a story to top (or at least compare) to each of ours since he has been on the road for four years now. Something Dan learned subsequently, upon sharing a room with Bruce, is that over four years he had really cut his “kit” to the minimum.  He had a long-sleeve shirt, a short-sleeve shirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of trousers, no underwear!!  By comparison Helena and I had our large packs including a change of clothes that we kept respectable for crossing borders and/or visiting consulates to get visas.

Edna, the older woman who serves as “housemother”, came in about 1800 and signed us in.  They are painting the hostel and things are a bit disarranged, but Edna and her husband are doing an excellent job with the upkeep.  I’ll be sharing a room with Alice, a Canadian woman who traveled down with one of the package overland trucks, and of course Dan is sharing a room with an assortment of men.  It took a while to get our membership cards and sign in because Edna is quite a talker, albeit very friendly.  She made quite a to-do about our being brother and sister and the first Bolivians to stay there.

When supper time rolled around there were about 8 of us there, so it was a crowded kitchen for a while.  Everyone else stayed to chat and drink while Dan and I went into the lounge to write and plan for the next few days.

Cape Town, South Africa, Wednesday, July 27-Thurs July 28, 1983

(DAN, 32+ years later).

That day we went up Table Mountain.  In spite of general advice we climbed up one side.  I don’t remember how long it took us, but I remember that Helena and I had a vigorous argument, I guess about where and how to climb.  It was essentially the first and last real argument we had had in nearly a year of traveling on a shoestring together!!

Helena on top of Table Mountain with a view to both bays and the "12 Apostles."

View of Cape Town from Table Mountain

View from Table Mountain to area with youth hostel

We then took the cable car down and spent some time walking in the older parts of town, including the Malay Quarters.

View from cable car

Malay Quarter, Cape Town

Malay Quarter, Cape Town

 Cape Peninsula, Friday-July 29, Saturday July 30.

We had already been considering the possibility of renting a car in our last few days of hitchhiking.  Furthermore, we wanted to get as far as possible down the Cape of Good Hope, I guess to be more precise in our assertion of having crossed the continent from north to south and from east to west at its broadest. Finally, it had been raining for most of the last 10 days.  After all, the winter is the rainy season in “Mediterranean climates”.

So we rented a car over the weekend and perhaps used up most of the rest of our money that way.  I guess that we must have put on our best set of consulate-visiting clothes for a car rental company to entrust a vehicle to us.  The main thing that I remember about the car was that it was a right-hand drive, as it should be in South Africa and quite new.  I had driven the landrover quite a bit in Zaire, but due to the fuel shortage we might meet one vehicle each day.  Here I had to turn on the motor and the drive out into four lanes of traffic, driving on the “wrong side”.  We survived.

With the vehicle we were able to take advantage of a couple of the many lovely camp grounds that they had in the country.

Our route (red) over the weekend, first down the Cape Peninsula, then north of the City, to Paarl and Stellenbosch.

 

Helena, the beginning of the Cape Peninsual, and for some reason the slide says "the European car".

Cape Peninsula view

Ostrich ranching on the Cape Peninsula

Cape Peninsula view, possibly to the very tip of the Cape of Good Hope

The sign says "Bordjiesrif  Nje Blankes" this was a beach for non whites only.

Paarl and Stellenbosch, Sunday July 31.

Wheat hills north of Cape Town

Countryside nearing Stellenbosch

 

Stellenbosch campground

Stellenbosch – Cape Town – Johannesburg, Monday Aug. 1^st.

We spent the night in Johannesburg, staying with our friends Martin and Cecily.  We have no pictures of that day so we must have spent our time getting ready for our long trip back to the US.  It should be pointed out that this was long before electronic reservations.  We had bought the ticket from Washington DC to Madrid, Spain and Jo’burg Washington DC almost a year later, and had to carry the physical long printed ticket in our neck bags for the whole year.  My neck bag was longer, therefore the tickets were against my sweaty skin, and the bag was only partly water-proof.  As I recall, those tickets were mighty deteriorated by the time we used them.

Dan at the Table Mountain view beach

Johannesburn – Cape Verde Islands – Washington DC, Tuesday, August 2.

The only thing we remember from that long flight from Jo’burg to Washington DC, is that we stopped to refuel in Cape Verde.  At the time it was stridently Anti-apartheid, but like Angola and People’s Republic of Congo, managed to quietly do plenty of business with the Regime. We refueled around midnight, so the only thing we know about Cape Verde is what we read in Wikipedia.

Conclusion

When we set out on trip we were not sure what countries we would be able to visit.  In all we visited 20 countries depending on whether or not you counted the “independent homelands”.  Our manuscript diary was on page 565 when it petered out.  This translated into 272 typed, legal-sized pages.  Adding in the pictures and editing out as much as possible, this turned into 73 blog posts.  We hope that you have enjoyed it.  As this is being posted we have had over 9000 visits, with a surprising number of these hits coming from Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Less than 1% of the hits have come from the African countries themselves.