One of the most widely spoken languages in South Africa is Xhosa or <click>’hosa.  If you click here, you can hear it said.  Xhosa imported a number of “click” sounds from the language of the Khoisan which is called !Xóõ.  This language is remarkable in that it has more phonemes than any other.  There are 83 different click sounds alone.  The Bantu speakers who displaced the Khoisan imported a few of these clicks into <click>hosa and it’s very arresting to hear these phonemes used by English speakers since you never hear them in any European languages.

Another set of photographs have been uploaded for your enjoyment.  These are the photographs from Cape Town and Grootbos.  Not quite so many this time you’ll be glad to know.

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Back to Cape Town and stay at the Cape Grace.  Packed for Namibia tomorrow.  A quiet nothing day.

The storm that the ranger had promised yesterday hit with some force overnight.  My dream of cycling from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth in the cool clear sunny South African winter was dented a bit by gale force winds and horizontal rain.  We’ve been very lucky with the weather during this holiday.  It’s easy to forget that South Africa does have a winter and there’s a reason why the landscape on the cape is so verdant.

We lit a fire in the cabin and played cards all morning but the weather lifted in the afternoon so we decided to go down to the Walker Bay Conservation Area (WBCA) and walk along the beach.  Without doubt, the WBCA is the single hardest place to find in South Africa.  In a country that signs sewage plants from four miles out, it was impossible to find.  We drove around and around looking for an entrance.  Finally after about an hour we drove through a housing development and there, at the end of a normal looking road was the (unsigned) entrance to WBCA.  Hurrah we thought.  As guests at Grootbos, we were supposed to be able to go in for free but the guy on the entrance wasn’t having any of it.  We showed him the key to our room but no dice.  I was going to pay for it anyway since it was only about four quid to get in but I’d left my wallet back in the cabin.  Aaargh.  So we had to drive back to Grootbos and get them to type up a letter saying that we really were residents and then drive back and show it to the guy on the gate. 

Some of the earliest settlers in Southern Africa were the San people who were displaced by (and somewhat merged) with the Khoi people before they in turn were marginalised by the Bantu speakers who came from the north.  All that remains of the Khoi-San in Southern Africa are their fossilised fishing implments and the clicks and clucks which are found in the Xhosa language here.  Or the <click>hosa language.  The Khoi-San do still exist at the very fringes in some very marginal places but they were almost wiped out.  There are some Khoi-san caves in the WBCA but all we could find were some rock depressions that people appeared to be using as toilets.  There are some shell middens around as well but once again, we weren’t lucky in finding them.  Maybe we should have gone on the guided Grootbos “Beach Safari” but we were all a little safaried-out by now.  It’s only a blooming beach after all.

 Despite not discovering the remanins of the Khoi-San, it was a beautiful beach walk.  We looked out over the ocean towards the South Pole and we collected a dog along the way who was christened “Sparky” for no good reason.  Sparky walked all the way from one end of the beach to the other with us finding and bringing back some extremely smelly old dead fish for our enjoyment. 

Tomorrow we drive back to Cape Town and then fly on to Windhoek in Namibia.  The trip down here was interesting.  Not maybe as exciting as the safari lodges and although Grootbos is good, it’s not in the same league as Phinda or Kwandwe.  Still, we had a nice time and that’s what holidays are about.

My pedantic and geographically knowledgeable wife and children would like to point out that I was completely wrong about the Cape of Good Hope being the “end of Africa”.  In fact, the most southerly point in Africa is Cape Agulhas.  This is also the point where <cue movie trailer voice> “two oceans collide”.  So that’s that sorted out then.

We got up and packed at the Cape Grace and they supplied us with a picnic for our drive down to Hermanus where the Grootbos nature reserve is located.  As we were checking out of the Cape Grace, we realised that breakfast was included!  So we didn’t leave quite as early as we’d expected because we were too busy stuffing our faces with fabulous bacon and boiled eggs.  Mmmmm….pork products (c) Homer Simpson.

The drive out of Cape Town is really easy going past the airport on the N2.  After about 50km we turned off the main road down the coastal N44.  This is really an outstandingly beautiful road.  The sun was shining and we drove round rocky headlands and through tiny little seaside towns.  It looks like most of them are retirement villages and in typical South African style, there’s absolutely no planning control whatsoever.  It appears as if you buy a plot of land and then build whatever you fancy on it.  You get Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist bungalows nestling next to cape cod wooden two story houses and thatched cottages (!).  There are wooden houses on stilts, brick built Victorian two up two downs and in one memorable case an peach coloured Mexican adobe villa.  However, the architectural monstrosities actually lend a certain cuteness to the little towns and the density of population here is so low that they don’t intrude on the scenery.  As we drove along the road, I did think that it would be a great long distance cycle.  From the Cape of Good Hope round the coast would be even more memorable on a bike although some of the hills would be pretty tough.

The town of Hermanus is another sleepy little Victorian seaside town renowned for the whale watching from the shores.  We joined a big group of people in a little park and stared out to sea for a bit but didn’t see any animals except a small rock hyrax (a “dassie”) which was picking up scraps.  Although it doesn’t say so in the tourist brochures, Hermanus should also be famous for the slowest coffee service in the southern hemisphere. 

It wasn’t far to the Grootbos reserve from Hermanus and when we arrived there the ranger said that if we wanted to go out to see the whales we had to leave right now!  Seemingly there was a storm coming in tomorrow and all the boats would be canceled so this was our only chance.  We grabbed our warm clothes and ate some of the Cape Grace picnic before we left.  I was slightly worried that we might see the picnic again if the water was rough.

We jumped in the car and drove at high speed down to the little town of Gansbaai which appears to be a town with no visible means of support except pensions, whale watching and shark diving.  It also has no harbour to speak of and so you have to get on the boat on dry land which is then pushed out into the water by a tractor.  It’s a little odd.  The boat isn’t big but it did have two huge outboard motors.  That gave me a little comfort…I could see the shark diving boats lined up as well.  As far as I could see, shark diving involved getting stuffed in a cage which looked like a supermarket trolley and then dropped into the ocean.  Despite some promises earlier on in the holiday, I was pretty sure I was going to flake on the shark diving.  Not only was it spending time in a supermarket trolley with bunch of 20ft killing machines, it was spending time in…the sea!

Trish, Isabelle and Hannah are good in small boats but I’m afraid that I’m a big wimp when it comes to “the Sea”.  As many of you know, I just don’t “get” boats (“caravans without wheels”) and the proximity to a big wet thing that’ll kill you doesn’t really make me feel relaxed.  This part of South Africa is still on the Atlantic and the ocean swells seemed pretty big to me.  Maybe 15 feet peak to trough.  You don’t get those sorts of waves on the Cam. 

The guides on the boats were standard issue.  Irritating because (unsurprisingly) they’re bored with the whole thing and have seen whales and dolphins and seals about a thousand times already but they have to feign the excitement.  The boat pitched up and down through the swells and everybody had a grand time except me since I kept thinking about the big wet sea on the other side of the hull which I might have to swim in. 

I was expecting this trip to be a bit of a disappointment when suddenly we were in the middle of a pod of Right Whales.  They were breaching (throwing their entire bodies out of the sea), spy hopping and coming right up to the side of the boat.  They’re huge and massively impressive animals.  They’re also extraordinarily difficult to take pictures of.  Between us, Trish and I took more than 120 pictures of which 115 were either of the sky, a featureless expanse of ocean or up somebody’s nostril.    Pitching around in the swell (gnnnnnhhhh) doesn’t make it easy.  We saw a mother with a calf, two whales mating (!) and countless close encounters as they drifted next to the boat.  Fundamentally, I think that watching sea animals from the surface is a little disappointing.  It is exciting and interesting to be so close to these huge animals but it might be a better experience on the Discovery Channel or with a David Attenborough voice over. 

After a while, they drifted off so we zoomed out even further into the sea (!) towards Dyer Island.  Dyer Island used to be a place where they collected guano to fertilise the fields.  Now it’s a tiny windswept patch of land in the South Atlantic with a little island (Geyser Rock) next to it which is home to a colony of 50,000 seals.  I’m not sure whether or not it’s the seals or the guano but it’s pretty smelly.  However, it’s not the guano or the seals that people come to see: between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock is a deep channel about 100m wide which is known as “Shark Alley”.  There are more Great White Sharks here than anywhere else.  They hide in the deep water and wait for a seal to swim between the two islands and then rocket up from the depths, catch the seal and then end up throwing themselves out of the water because they’re going so fast.  We didn’t see any sharks unfortunately.  I was a bit worried about the shark bit having seen Jaws when I was younger but there’s a big campaign on in South Africa to rehabilitate the shark and fix its reputation problem.  We saw a great TV commercial in the Cape Town Aquarium:  happy families playing in the sea, then a scream, hundreds of people running from the water, the “duh duh duh duh” Jaws music and then cut back to toaster floating in the sea.  The tag line:  “Last year toasters killed 798 people, sharks killed 9″.  In a single year in the US, 43,687 people injure themselves on their toilet (what are  they doing in there?).  This is 600 times more people than have been attacked by Great White Sharks in South Africa over 77 years.  You are more likely to be killed by a falling coconut while driving to the beach than devoured by a shark while swimming. 

Anyway, no shark sightings so all we had to brave was the increasingly rough sea to get back to Gansbaai.   Grootbos is very much in the same mold as the previous places we’d been.  The food is great, it’s comfortable, very pleasant and like everywhere else in South Africa, it’s got a very good wine cellar indeed.

Cape Town is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and, to be honest, it is a richly deserved accolade.  It’s a real city in that it has docks and a central business district and bad industrial sites etc but it is set in the most astounding scenery.  Table Mountain and the associated mountains rise over 1000m directly over the city and provide an amazing backdrop.

It feels like many southern cities (Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne).  There’s a degree of “coolness” to the city but the chic feels a little pasted on on top of the old colonial feel.  There’s a lot of raw big boned blokes in boots and a sensible hat who look like they could shear a sheep, bring down a wildebeest or drink a gallon of beer walking past the Sharper Image and the interiors shops. 

We spent Saturday chilling out in the Cape Grace Hotel and doing a bit of shopping in the Victoria and Albert Waterfront development.  As I said in the previous entry, it’s indistinguishable from the South Street Seaport in New York.  It is very much targeted at the new middle class in South Africa and is a pleasant example of the genre.  We ate at a very nice Belgian/African fusion restaurant called Den Anker.  Ostrich steaks and slow cooked Springbok on the menu.  Very very nice indeed.  We had an absolutely superb pinotage wine.  It’s worth noting here that at 7 rand to the Dollar or 14 rand to the pound, South Africa is very very cheap indeed.  Den Anker is a pretty up-scale restaurant and most main courses were less than 8 pounds. 

On Sunday we decided to brave the roads and drive down to the end of the cape.  Breakfast was enlivened by a classical Hannah comment.  They have the usual “two eggs any style with your choice of sausages, bacon, beans etc” breakfast at the Cape Grace.  Hannah asked for “two eggs without the eggs, just the bacon”.  How we laughed.  We picked up the hire car keys and headed out on the roads of Cape Town.  Some trepidation.  In fact, the roads in Cape Town (and South Africa) are perfect.  Better than the roads in the UK.  We’d decided to drive round the Chapman’s Point road which is one of the most spectacular roads in the world.  It makes Highway 1 which goes from L.A. to San Francisco look like the north circular.  Unfortunately we could only go about 4km up the road before it was closed for maintenance but the bit that we drove was spectacular. 

A bit of a detour over the spine of the cape brought us to Hout Bay and then along the coast through Fish Hoek to Simon’s Town.  This little seaside town is an almost faithful reproduction of a slightly faded British sea side town.  However, it’s almost completely unspoiled.  There are still the original cast iron built Victorian shops with verandas and balconies.  Unlike any British sea side town, there are towering mountains and the wide blue Indian Ocean as a backdrop.

The “end of africa” is only about 30km from Cape Town but the last 10 or 15km are a national park.  This part of Africa is home to the Fynbos.  For those of you too lazy to click on the link, there are 6 different floral kingdoms in the world and the smallest and rarest is the Fynbos.  There are thousands of species of flowers and plants which are found nowhere else in the world and are restricted to this very small pocket of Mediterranean climate.  Table Mountain on it’s own has more than 2000 species of plants which is more than the whole of the United Kingdom.  Amazing eh?  There are also some amazingly smelly baboons, zebra, tortoise etc.

The cape splits into two right at the end.  On one side is Cape Point where there’s a light house, a restaurant and the inevitable visitor center and gift shop.  We zoomed up to the top and then set out on the walk to the Cape of Good Hope which is the furthest south and is where <do your deep movie trailer voice> “two oceans collide“!  It was a wonderful walk along the cliffs with huge crashing waves (some larger than a “lions foot” – in-joke I’m afraid).  The wind blew, the sun came out and path wound on and then finally we were standing on the Cape of Good Hope.  The End of Africa.

On the way back we passed a group of four frenchmen who were so hot they’d taken off their trousers in an attempt to cool down.  The French truly are an inscrutable people.  An easy drive home through the extremely exclusive developments of Constantia and we were back in the superb Cape Grace to pack for the next leg of our journey.  Whales and diving with Great White Sharks at Grootbos…eek.