Smokin' Judas!

After leaving Sunday at 6:30am we arrived safe and disoriented in on Monday at 8:00pm in Durban. The flight was one blur of broken sleep and 600 pages and the strangely poignant sensation (one I didn’t particularly feel on the way to Australia) that I was hoping over the equator.

Hair Salons (Hair n’ More, Black Dog, Chickies, to name a few), candy stands, and whistling public taxi drivers filled my brief view of Durban as I went in search of a comprehensive city map. Catching an afternoon flight, we sped over to Cape Town in a two hour package of turbulence and rented car.

From the highway, Cape Town was a life-sized economic Lego set; a rainbow of tin, cell-phone trailers, and cellular wires form shanty towns which morph into government built Mandela houses, and shift to the "Beverly Hills" of cape townships, as one of our cabbies called them, circling around the electrical plant before an abrupt end at district six. The city bowl, laying at the base of Table mountain, is constructed with colonial-victorian facades and palm tress, suburbs complete with self employed car watchers. On the rim of the city bowl calls to prayer sound from the Malaise districts.
The next morning we were told to take advantage of a clear day; a two hour hike up Platteklip gorge to the top of Table Mountain proved to be an extraordinary introduction to the cityscape.

As I stood at the look out point, I was shrouded in the hazy 'tablecloth,' a cloud that perpetually surrounds devils peak except on the most clear of days. Seventh Sealesque local fable says that Boor Jan van Hunks agreed to a smoking contest with a stranger on the slopes, and after six long days won—only to find that the stranger was the devil himself. Mr. Hunks was abruptly swept up in the puff of sore-loser smoke, the trail of which lingers around Table Mountain.

A lovely afternoon at Kirstenbosch National Bontanical Garden was complete with another 3 hour hike up skeleton gorge and a sighting of a neighborly gang of mongoose! Curry and samosas at Bo-Kaap Kombuis Malay Restaraunt completed our first glance of the cape peninsula.

~a