Being a tourist in the city of Cape Town

Over the past 3 days, we’ve walked all over most of Cape Town proper.  We covered Milnerton, downtown, the entire Waterfront, the Gardens, Robben Island, and everywhere in between.  We rode to Robben Island on an early morning ferry that gave us a beautiful view of Cape Town in the morning.  The island is a magical place, blending a wonderful view with an infamous history and an impressive museum and rebound from its apartheid-era usage.  The tour began with a bus tour of the island highlighting the different barracks, the town in which almost all museum/island employees live, and the home of Sobukwe, a political prisoner who was restricted to solitary living the rest of his life.  Cool fact- one of the churches on the island hosts all town weddings on one day of the year: February, 14^th, yep on Valentine’s Day…how romantic?!  The second part of the tour is led by an ex-political prisoner who took us through the barracks in which he lived, explain life in the prison, and gave us the history of the famous B Barracks that housed Mandela and many other notable political prisoners.  Our guide was imprisoned in 1978 for incitement, a charge that was evidently the popular reason for throwing a non-white political activist in jail.  There’s something truly special and unique about learning about a place as famous as Robben Island from someone who actually lived the daily abuse and persecution.  We stood in the courtyard in which Mandela was allowed his one hour outside each day and hid some of his revolutionary documents that would assist in the ending of Apartheid, we experienced history.  Our final experience on the island was not a great one though.  The island is known for being home to tons of penguins so on our way back to the ferry, we took a walk on penguin boardwalk.  We made it a third of the way down, had seen no penguins, only the hundreds of brown birds covering the path in front of us, and could no longer stand the indescribable stench of the bird poop that we soon realized we were walking through.  Needless to say, we spent the next five minutes running back to the ferry, doing our best to scrape the crap off of our shoes.

The rest of the day we spent milling around the V&A Waterfront, which is a beautiful (although very touristy) area of town, with great shops, a big mall, wonderful scenery, and colorful/impressive lodging and living that rival any major wharf or harbour view.

On Wednesday afternoon, we visited the District Six museum, which is a unique exhibition of the effects of the Apartheid-era in South African history.  In the 20^th century, the city was divided into districts, and District Six was a vibrant, diverse community of African, Colored, Indian, Muslim, and Jewish families, known for wonderful music, dancing, and living.  But in 1966, the government began the forced removal of the entire community, as the district was now a “White Group Area” and leveled the land.  The residents were moved to the Cape Flats, which are larger, more barren, drier areas of the city with little sense of community.  One of the worst parts is that the area to this day remains flat; no one developed the land.  In 1994 with the creation of the new, democratic government, the District Six museum was created to bring the former, rightful residents together to share their experiences and build a common story.  This story is what we observed in the small, but incredibly informative, 2-story exhibit of the District Six museum.  Although not directly exhibiting Apartheid and its policies and history, the story of District Six exemplifies the grave effects of the Apartheid government on non-white populations in SA.