We walked and walked and walked……

11,938 steps and 8.0 km in fact.

We headed for the downtown core of Cape Town on foot today. A 15 minute walk had us exploring along Long Street where there are so many lovely old buildings now housing everything from beer halls to craft stores. Many were build in the late 1800’s.

We stopped to browse through the Greenmarket Square and managed to stimulate the local economy a little. Then we headed over to the District Six Museum. District Six was the scene of the removal of over 60,000 inhabitants in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s under the apartheid regime and specifically under the Group Areas Act. The area was an active and lively community as early as in the late 1800s, full of indigenous peoples and immigrants of all sorts of descents; Malay, Blacks, Indians and Afrikaners. Their homes were flattened and they were relocated to a dreary area outside the city. Under the Group Areas Act, people were also moved out of rural areas. After the fall of apartheid in 1994 the government started to rebuild the area and Nelson Mandela oversaw the return of residents as early as 2003. Claimants are still working to get their property rights and housed re-built as well as restitution for lost quality of life, loss of education, etc.

Oh, and yes, Cape Town does have a Hop On, Hop Off Bus too.

Next it was a walk past the very impressive Cape Town City Hall built in 1905, where Nelson Mandela made his first speech as President from the balcony of this incredible building. The limestone for the building was imported from Bath, England.

Of course we couldn’t come to a capital city of a country and not see the legislative buildings! Being a Saturday it was unfortunately closed. South Africa is interesting in that it really has 3 capitals: Cape Town is the seat of Parliament, Pretoria is the administrative capital and seat of the President and Cabinet, and Bloemfontein is the judicial capital and seat of the Supreme Court. Below is a small section of the National Parliament Buildings but is not the main building as we seem to have missed that in our wandering.

We had gradually been making our way toward The Company Garden, in the centre of the city and adjacent to the Parliament buildings. The Garden originated in 1650 and is the oldest garden in the country. It was started as a garden for the founder and Dutch colonial administrator of Cape Town, Jan Van Riebeeck but is now a really lovely public garden which I bet is really busy at lunch time during the week. Today it was full of families and couples and groups of friends enjoying the warm winter day. You can see Table Mountain from the garden, as you can from almost everywhere in Cape Town. You see it sneaking through the branches of this picture of some pink blossoms on some trees in the garden. Nice to experience spring twice in one year.

We stopped for a quick salad at a lovely outdoor cafe in the Garden to the sounds of a few young people busking in park singing really pleasing traditional African songs.

After lunch we wandered through the park to find the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and past the Slave Bell. The history of Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa is long and detailed and I’m not even going to start with it here. I’ve read lots of Wilbur Smith books and he figures prominently Smith’s historical fiction. The Cape Dutch design Slavery Bell was built in 1911/1912. Bells such as this one were used to call slaves to various tasks during their day, but this one was built after slavery was abolished.

Then it was back to our home away from home this week, the Cape Milner Hotel, where we discovered our chariot awaits! This will be our transport for the next 22 days as we depart tomorrow for Lampert’s Bay north along the coast of South Africa on our way to Namibia.