Are We There Yet? (25 page)

I stopped at a set of traffic lights near the hotel and was instantaneously greeted by a mahogany face at the window. Despite the fact that I was driving your bog-standard 1.8 Toyota Corolla rental, I immediately assumed that I was about to be carjacked. Not an entirely unreasonable premise given that only that day a seventeen-year-old Pretoria boy had taken his sister and brother hostage demanding guns, ammunition, two-way radios, R6 million in R200 notes ransom and his favoured getaway vehicle: a 1.6-litre Hyundai Excel. My point is the criminal mind works in strange ways and I was about to leap from the car begging for my life when my would-be assailant motioned for me to wind down the window. I did as I was told, only to be offered a choice of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana or a buy-in-bulk-and-save combination of all three. Declining with a “no thank you but I appreciate the offer”, I sped away in the direction of my hotel and turned into the driveway having seen the ugliest facets of arguably the most naturally beautiful city on the face of the planet.

I woke up the next morning ready to be seduced and glanced out my window at a 1000-metre-high aphrodisiac. It is impossible to overstate the presence of Table Mountain in Cape Town. Almost ten kilometres long and over three wide, it can be seen from as far as 200 kilometres out to sea and is the only landscape element on the planet to have a constel-lation named in its honour. It's called the Mons Mensa (Latin for Table Mountain) and is a next-door neighbour to the Southern Cross. The mountain is garlanded by more plant species than are found in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland combined. It is wholly inanimate but possesses an undeniable soul. Viewed from the north, its sandstone ramparts coalesce into an amphitheatre whose dimensions are topped only by the magnificence of a vista that renders superlatives impotent. Six times older than the Himalayas, Table Mountain presides over the city at its feet like a wise and kindly quartzite benefactor.

The first European to come over all Edmund Hillary upon seeing it was a Portuguese navigator and admiral by the name of Antonio De Saldhana. In March 1503 he packed some sandwiches and clambered up a perilously inclined skinny fault in the northern face known as Platteklip Gorge – the first word being Afrikaans for “flat stone” and we're not talking horizontal. Judging by the name he gave the mountain – Taboa do Cabo (Table of the Cape) which sounds more like one of those upmarket delis where the staff feel compelled to correct your pronunciation of tapenade – Antonio wasn't much for descriptions. That task was better left to another of his countrymen, explorer Livio Sanuto who explored the summit in 1588 and wrote that it “hath formed here a great plain, pleasant in situation which with the fragrant herbs, variety of flowers and flourishing verdure of all things, seems a terrestrial paradise”.

Table Mountain is framed on one side by the conical Devil's Peak, so named because Lucifer apparently once lost a pipe-smoking contest up there to a local farmer. It continues to blow the stream of alabaster cloud that tumbles from its flat-topped neighbour and is known as the tablecloth. This phenomenon is actually caused by southeast winds that bring moisture-filled air from the sea into contact with the mountain, where it rises, cools and condenses into downy cloud quilts.

To the right of Table Mountain is the 699-metre Lions Head peak. One of its flanks boasts a marginally leonine rock protuberance and faces the Atlantic, while the other dips and levels out over a kilometre to Signal Hill, otherwise known as the Lions Rump. The combined effect is that of a recumbent feline, the tip of whose tail emerges several kilometres out to sea as Robben Island. Viewed from the string of eastern beaches and glittering bays, the mountain is a craggy behemoth butted up against a succession of nine peaks which wade ankle-deep in the blue ocean at their feet and are somewhat confusingly called the Twelve Apostles.

Johannesburgers like us always considered Cape Town as somewhat less cosmopolitan than our golden metropolis. But in truth, for me anyway, it was the voice of deep and abiding jealousy. I envied my cousins who spoke of volunteering for surf-livesaving patrols and coast-guard activities. I coveted the fact that they had a “home” beach. But I would have swapped it all for the mountain at their back door. Like meditation made manifest, it simultaneously stills and energises me.

A certain young lady who inspired precisely the same response in me was shortly to fly in from Sydney and I figured that the Mountain would provide no end of help in securing an affirmative response to a question I would pop once we hit the summit. Unlike the intrepid Portuguese adventurers and the numerous hikers who venture up one of the 350 trails to the summit, my plan called for a semblance of dashing charm and a speech bubbling with heartfelt declarations. Difficult enough to conjure without being marinated in your own sweat and wheezing between every syllable. Clearly this wasn't going to be a case of “you had me at 'stop complaining about those blisters there's only five kilometres to go'”. So with a ring in my pocket and a lump in my throat, I steered Jennie towards the queue for the cable cars that ferry thousands of visitors a year to the summit.

Having asked Jennie's dad for his daughter's hand a few days earlier, I now thought of my own father and how he would never meet the woman who would, I hoped, take his name. He had, however, been beside me the last time I made this mountaintop pilgrimage. I have only two memories of the experience. The first was that the cars were cramped metal cages that resembled enclosed Ferris wheel seats. The second was that I picked out a relative's house way below on the shores of Camps Bay because of the distinctive shape of their swimming pool. I was told by my parents I was talking nonsense, which swiftly became “You're ruining it for everybody” as I continued to point out what I could clearly see and they couldn't.

The old cars had been replaced by high-speed models that rotated during the three-minute journey from the base station. Around twenty-five people can fit in each and the universal vowels of gobsmacked wonder plus the whir of camera lenses filled the cabin as we ascended. Being the premier tourist attraction in South Africa's premier tourist city, I had feared the mountaintop would be too crowded to find a secluded spot to do my spiel. Fortunately, there are three kilometres of walking tracks on the summit and within a few minutes we were sitting on a secluded precipice above a sweep of azure ocean pounding a succession of columned peaks. I found out later that my paramour was thinking, “If I had the balls, I'd ask him to marry me right now”.

Somehow the lines I had rehearsed a million times on the road came out in the correct order. Perched on one knee with a sheer drop at my back, I placed the ring onto her finger and was greeted with the response, “Oh my God, you're doing it!” Which after a brief interlude of vexed clarification, I was told meant “Yes”.

In a glazed daze we wandered the summit hand in hand before repairing to a beachfront bar in Camps Bay for champagne.

Aside from being a creamy expanse of beach bounded by smooth boulders on either side, wide strips of lawn and chunky palm trees, Camps Bay is also the suburb in which three generations of my mother's family lived. It is one of the few places in South Africa to which I felt a genuine connection.

This strip of surf was the stage on which my Aunt Fay would strut with a hibiscus behind her ear and a midmorning martini in her hand. A kosher Mame who was something of a bombshell in her youth, she volunteered for the nursing corps in World War II on the grounds that she looked great in white. Family folklore has it that another aunt was walking on the beach one morning with a friend when in the distance a woman approached in an ensemble for which “makeshift” is too kind a description. “Look at that,” said my Aunt Monica, “it looks like she's taken a sheet, sewed up the sides then cut two holes for the arms and one for the head.” Lo and behold, Fay materialised from the mist with the greeting, “Darling! Don't you just adore my new caftan? I took a sheet, sewed up the sides then cut two holes for the arms and one for the head.”

When darkness fell, we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner and began calling home to share the news as it was now early morning on the eastern seaboard of Australia. Although we tried to be discreet throughout the conversation with my prospective parents-in-law, fellow diners overheard the tale of the mountain proposal and sent over a bottle of champagne by way of congratulation. Although it was an individual gesture of kindness, it left us with an affection towards Cape Town and its residents that will endure henceforth.

Seapoint was a far more attractive prospect by day than it was by night and the next morning we wandered along the ocean-front promenade. The path is several kilometres long and bounded by a stone wall over which frothy explosions of sea spray leap. A string of coloured lights runs between the lampposts on the path, which is bordered by patches of grass large enough to accommodate dog walkers, several games of six-a-side soccer and the odd wino howling at the moon.

The paths were packed with groups of shirtless lunchtime joggers, mothers cantering along behind prams and even – bless – a few retirees who gladdened my heart by bellowing, “So this is a race track now?” to anyone who had the temerity to pass them.

The shimmer of the Seapoint Public Swimming pool, a sleek Art Deco collection of change rooms and admission booths, was exactly as I remembered it. But the high diving board on whose precipice I had cowered before hanging off the edge by my arms and bellyflopping into the water was inevitably more modest.

Alerted by the beep of a horn and a shrill cry of “Cape Town”, we boarded one of the crowded taxi minivans that make up for the city's abject lack of public transport and leapt out a few minutes later at the Victoria & Albert Waterfront.

Locals rave about the place and although it revitalised the once scungy harbour district, replacing venereal sailors with well-heeled tourists, it is, at the end of the day, a shopping mall. Or more accurately a collection of them straight out of that struts-and-plexi school of retail architecture whose practitioners should be condemned to assembling IKEA furniture in hellish perpetuity. Save for the mountain peering down on the scene, we could have been in Sydney's Darling Harbour or San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf and would not have known the difference.

Cape Town is a fairly compact city to navigate on foot, so we struck out towards the CBD past fishing boats unloading crates of rock lobster and tuna. Outside the impressive city aquarium stood a line of Muslim students in white fez-style hats, long navy trousers and matching shirts. They must have been six or seven and all looked immaculate despite the heat of the day and the volume of their clothing. A few of the scampish scoundrels at the back of the line even made sure they were out of the range of teacher's ears and shot a “Howzit pretty lady!” towards Jennie.

Unlike Johannesburg where businesses have fled the CBD in the face of horrendous crime and ambivalent policing, Cape Town's authorities took proactive action when they saw things heading the same way. The result is a city centre that teems with visitors, smartly dressed office workers of all races, roadside traders of one, and low-key security.

The foreshore sits on 240 hectares of reclaimed land and at a busy intersection near the main railway station is a statue of Jan Van Riebeck who dropped his ship's anchor in that very spot and stepped ashore to do what no white had ever done before: stay.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the Khoikhoi herders of the Cape peninsula had become quite used to the European vessels that stopped over as they plied the lucrative spice route to the East Indies. Almost two hundred years beforehand a Portuguese explorer named Bartolomeu Dias had strode ashore at Mossel Bay halfway between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. His party and the Khoikhoi eyed one another nervously and when the sailors made for a fresh-water stream, one of the tribesmen hurled a stone in their direction, only to be impaled by a bolt from a crossbow. And so at the first meeting between Europeans and Africans, the die was cast for their subsequent dealings.

Dias was exploring what was known as the Sea of Darkness — reputed to be boiled by a sun that turned all men to Negroes. His mission was to provide a solution to the conundrum that had hamstrung Europe's merchants for half a century: finding a sea route to India that would cut out the Arab middlemen who controlled the overland tracks. Dias reached Algoa Bay, but in a rickety ship and high seas, he was bound by his king to respect the majority decision of the senior crew and turn back. A decade later a compatriot named Vasco da Gama not only rounded what Dias had christened Cabo da Boa Esperança (The Cape of Good Hope) but continued up the east coast of Africa to modern-day Mombassa. He then sailed on to Goa, returning with cargo of cinnamon and pepper a year after leaving Lisbon.

Fast-forward a century and the sea route to Asia was being used by Dutch, English, French and Scandinavian merchant ships who occasionally landed on the Cape Peninsula to take in fresh water and barter sheep and cattle from the Khoikhoi pastoralists in return for iron and copper goods. A fair few of these vessels came a cropper around what also became known as the Cape of Storms. In 1647 the
Haarlem
– which belonged to the Dutch East India Company, the Microsoft of its day – ran aground in Table Bay. Rather than abandon the ship and its cargo, the master of the accompanying fleet ordered a contingent to remain until the following year's fleet swung by to collect them.

A sand fort was built and twelve months later the sailors were picked up as promised with their tenure proving that the land was habitable. One of those on the fleet making its way back from the east was Jan Van Riebeck, who was returning to his employers under a cloud of disgrace after being found guilty of private trading.

Anxious to restore his standing with the Dutch East India Company, he would have agreed to practically any assignment. They had a doozy in store.