So Josh’s and mine holiday adventure had finished, but despite the masses of hard work we were doing over the 6 months we were there, we did get a few weekends where we could see some of South Africa, other than just the inside of the ABSA office. We were extremely lucky to have a meeting scheduled in Cape Town on a Friday, which meant we were free to spend the weekend there. We couldn’t wait to leave Pretoria and spend some time in this cool and sexy place which has so much history and culture to offer.
Our meeting on that Friday went very well, and immediately after, we sat down in a cafe next to the headquarters of the bank in question. We were served by this blond Afrikaner dude who struggled to speak English at times, but was very excited to meet some foreigners and had no problems offering me some of the Cape’s finest marijuana and a ride on his surfboard as soon as Josh’s back was turned. While I thanked him and turned down the kind offer of buying drugs off a complete stranger whilst in a foreign country on a business trip (surprise, surprise), a part of me was weirdly excited. We were clearly far, far from the Pretorian crowd here in the southernmost tip of Africa.
The first evening was spent enjoying the bars of Cape Town, and the next day we decided to go sight seeing around the city centre and learn something about this place. We took the standard ‘hop on, hop off, get a beer and then hop back on’ sightseeing bus and managed to get quite a bit of the city covered. It was refreshing to be in a city where you could walk around for a change, and especially the downtown part of Cape Town is really cool, with some cool and good looking architecture. This is the Afro-chic city of South Africa, boasting a much more multinational and hipster crowd.
Cape Town is actually where the most mixing happened and where the “coloured” ethnicity was born. Back in the day the original indigenous Khoi-San settlers rejected the Dutch settlers from the Dutch East India company who arrived at their ports and many refused to work for them. The Dutch were therefore forced to bring over slaves from India, Madagascar, Malaysia etc. They exploited both these slaves and the local Khoi San for labour and their women for sex. There was a lot of interracial love making (mainly without the love part) and this formed the basis of the large coloured community in South Africa today. And as is always the case, fusion leads to beautiful, unique and sexy communities, and also explains the large Asian and Muslim populations in this region of Africa.
My favourite and most touching part of the day was visiting the District 6 museum. District 6 was one of the multi-racial areas of Cape Town which was most affected by the apartheid regime in the 1960s and 1970s (yes older readership, some of you were alive while this horrible shit was going down). There were a lot of awful and unspeakable things that happened during the apartheid era in South Africa and racial segregation was at the heart of each of them. District 6 had over 60,000 inhabitants forcibly removed from their homes and sent to the outskirts of town and shunned from the rest of society. These inhabitants were those deemed “black”, “coloured” or “Indian”, or as they were conveniently grouped at the time “non-whites”. The visit to the museum was sad for me, but thinking about it now, what saddens me the most is over 40 years later, how much have we really progressed as a society since?
In the afternoon we made the decision to climb table mountain. As already described in my previous blog, table mountain is the most incredible place. Another thing it is, is about 1000 meters above sea level, making it really motha-fucking cold. Obviously cold was the opposite of the summer weather we were having back down at sea level, and a sensation I hadn’t experienced since I’d left London a couple of weeks prior. Although I had a jacket and jeans, as soon as I stepped off the cable car onto the tip of the mountain I felt like I had set off to climb snowy Everest in my bra and hot pants. Proof enough of my suffering is the record low selfie numbers taken during that day.
Josh, on the other hand, has resilient English blood in his veins and is used to walking around in the cold in a tshirt. While he felt it was a “bit nippy”, he seemed to cope with the situation a whole lot better than I was. He was prancing around smiling and fully enjoying the whole experience, and although I absolutely loved the views, once the cold moves beyond your extremities and your internal organs begin to slowly shut down there is not much even the most beautiful view can do to stop you dying a slow and painful death. Luckily we made it back in one piece, and that evening we treated ourselves to a nice (warm) seafood dinner to make up for it – the Cape’s famous Kingklip, and of course a couple more glasses of South Africa’s finest grape juice…..hiccup…..
