If It's Friday, It Must Be Cape Town

Before going to bed on Thursday, I asked Gretchen, a doe-eyed black guy - yes, a guy, and here it's okay to call him colored - to recommend a way to spend Friday and he turned me on to an all-day tour called "The Best of the Cape." It promised a trip to Cape Point, which surprisingly is an hour's drive southwest of Cape Town; penguin viewing; Cape baboons; maybe a whale or two; a stop in Stellenbosch, the oldest settlement in South Africa and a wine tasting at the famous (even though I've never heard of it, they sell over a million bottles of win a year) Zevenwacht Winery. It also guaranteed unmatched vistas for photography. I booked it immediately and unlike dinner last night, it more than lived up to the advance publicity.
Cheryl, our young, blonde driver and guide - Afrikaans but speaking English with lilting uplifts in tone at the end of each sentence as though asking us to agree with what she was saying - picked me up in a mini-van at 8:45. As is always my luck, she had picked up everyone else first - two ladies of a certain age from Zurich (the kind, I told myself, that I'd be squiring for the next 30 days); a mixed couple, he French and she Congolese; a young Australian couple on their honeymoon; and an elderly German with his much younger nephew, grandson or, if you're like me and believe that we are everywhere, his lover - and they had taken all the best seats. Only the rear bench was left for me, so I slunk back and sat in the middle with my left leg, the one that's partly artificial, out in the center aisle. At the first stop, Cheryl asked me if I was okay and when I told her about my knee, she insisted that I move up front in the bucket seat next to her. What luck! I had great vies and could hear everything she said. I know now that I've had my fifteen minutes of luck. I'll never win the lottery. Or be struck by lightening.
Cape Point was spectacular! I took the funicular almost to the top,w here I still had to climb many steps to reach the lighthouse, but the effort and the sweat - it was very hot - was rewarded with incredible views of the mountains, the sea and a sense of the immensity of space I haven't enjoyed since Machu Picchu. And what a day. No clouds. Just blue sky forever. Chapman's Peak Road, to and after the point, clung to the side of the mountains like the Amalfi Drive and was every bit as breathtakingly beautiful. As one could expect from a guy a tour guide once called "Papa Razz," I took many, many pictures. As we were leaving the point, there was even a white cruise ship out in the sea and I wondered if it was mine. (As it turned out, it was.)
This was the highlight of the day. But we also stopped at an ostrich farm where the German daddy tourist fed grass to a female ostrich, which greedily snatched it from his hand through the fence as we all tried to digitally capture her incredible eyelashes. The penguins were small and not very interesting and went about their business - mostly sleeping in the sun - as we snapped away less than a few feet from our targets. But the place, called The Boulders, overlooking False Bay (I can explain that at some dinner party when I get home), was a huge and beautiful inlet with sparkling white sand beaches and water that incredible turquoise I fell in love with in Cancun. After being warned, severely and many times by signs saying they are dangerous and clever and hungry and pick you pockets, we only saw one baboon, perched on a roof as placidly as an old man waiting patiently for a bus. We stopped for lunch at Stellenbosch (Mr. Stellen's woods), a touristy town where I had a lonely sandwich and photographed the doorway of the oldest house in South Africa (1704). At the winery, we sampled two shites and two reds, all heavy and complex and with high alcohol content. Maybe that's why the German granddaddy was inspired to tell jokes on the way home that we had to strain to appreciate. And with an accent, no less!
I did learn that Cape Town was founded by the Dutch East India Company to provide a way-stop to re-provision and grow fresh produce that might help their crews avoid scurvy on the long trip to the East. Then the English got greedy and went to war. We passed several townships, settlements of tin shacks, slumy favellas, which Cheryl explained were encouraged by the government, which flattens the ground and installs a few latrines and the people just come. Imagine! Electric lines into the shacks are dangerously live but most shacks have a satellite dish for TV. A car was once considered the ultimate indicator of some degree of prosperity. Now it's TV. Will cell phones and computers be next? Do you yet have your Blackberry? And all this before nutrition and education. As I finish this entry, I'm also finishing my gin and tonic, favored in India to beat the heat, but not seeming to accomplish that for me. As I sit in the bar while the overworked air conditioning in my room struggles to lower the temperature enough for a modicum of modest comfort, I can't help but think of my cab ride tomorrow at noon in the required navy blazer, tan trousers, white shirt and red tie in this extremely uncomfortable African heat. Now just where did I pack that nail file?