The Formula One of Hotels

Cape Town meant an end to our short camping adventure for now, we had to go back into a hotel. After the relatively expensive places we stayed in in Clarens and Cradock we decided to plump for a cheaper option this time, a Formula One. This French chain advertises itself as: "All you need in a hotel room", but neglected to finish the sentence with "and not a thing more". The hotel provided just the basics, everything else was obtainable from vending machines. The room was like a real hotel room that had been vacuum packed into a smaller space. The bathroom is molded from one piece of plastic, shaped around the shower and toilet, and welded into the corner of the room. When you shower the whole unit gets flooded. The bedroom proper consists of a double bed with a single bunk bed stacked sideways above it, reachable by a metal ladder. There is a sink in the corner and a tiny triangular table with an even tinier stool to perch on in the opposite corner.

Sleeping in a dorm is always a bit fraught, as everyone tip-toes around trying not to interfere with other people's personal space or offend their evening habits. Then there is the potential for disturbing snoring, coughing or staying up too late and keeping the lights on. Luckily, we have so far not discovered any incompatible behaviour patterns, thus the potential for saving some money on hotel rooms still stands.

Unfortunately we needed to use the room as a drying space for dive gear after our visit to the aquarium, too, so with the hanging space under  and the rail across the bunk bed the room soon looked like a dive shop, BCDs and regulators, wet suits and booties all spread out to dry. Luckily we were on the ground floor and the car was parked right outside, so we could climb through the window and ferry gear in and out of the room quite easily. It also helped to smuggle the gas stove and kettle as well as breakfast ingredients into the room without having to go past the receptionist.

Diving in Two Oceans

Today one of my dreams came true. We dived in the predator tank in Cape Town Two Oceans aquarium. Ever since I saw the leaflet on my last visit I thought what a cool thing to be on the other side of the window. This is probably one of my favourite aquariums, it has very sophisticated exhibits, lots of information, and the main tanks are beautifully designed and lit. Somehow an aquarium doesn't have that depressingly lonely feel of a zoo, either, although the penguins never look very happy.

There are actually two tanks to dive in, the predator tank and the kelp forest. Both seem endless, like a window out to sea, the tantalisingly big fish just happening to appear in front of the aquarium window as we watch them, hypnotised by the movement and speckled light.

All morning I was beyond excited. I had no idea what to expect, just that there would be two dives, the predator dive and the kelp dive. Matt, our dive leader, took us to the tanks in the darkened exhibition space and explained the process, how to behave around the fish (keep your distance from the sharks, the rays won't sting, so you can let them touch you; watch the turtles, they may snap; if you get tangled in the kelp, don't yank it out) and what we would be doing (you can look for shark teeth in the sand - sharks can lose up to 40000 teeth in their life time -, we will feed the fish from a bag of pilchards, swim around at your own pace, don't get lost).

Next we went behind the scenes. To get into the tank we had to climb onto the roof of the building, where the aquarium is open to the elements. The tanks are covered with blue tarps to prevent evaporation. There was a big old rusty pump to simulate the swell in the kelp tank, rushing sea water into the container every now and then. A platform stretched across the water surface down some rickety steps to get into the water. It all looked pretty ramshackle from here, with old pipes and flaking white washed walls, compared to the controlled environment below. There was a real feeling of smoke and mirrors, feet furiously paddling below to maintain the calm elegance of the exhibition.

We first went into the predator tank, as the water was slightly warmer at 18C. Getting into the water was easy, we just ducked under the tarps, slipped off the platform into the water and dropped past the shark circuit - they like to cruise closer to the surface. And then we were in the aquarium. It was actually only 5 meters deep, but as with all dives, once you lose sight of the surface, the rest of the world becomes a theoretical location to return to by necessity rather than choice. In the water the surface is irrelevant compared to the strange and amazing world around us. Here were large wrasses, yellow tails, sting-rays in increasing sizes, ragged-tooth sharks and turtles. And amazingly, here in front of us, was the window. People were staring, waving, pointing, at us - and the fish we had joined on the other side. It was eery to be here, not on the side of the air breathers, that despite of all the equipment I needed to sustain myself down here, I was now one of the aquatics.

We really just spent the time swimming around, watching the rays pass us - the large ray had a habit of slowly passing flat along the glass with it's underside to the viewers, a very elegant move executed with a simple swish of the wing. Occasionally a shark would grace us below, still above us so we could marvel at the row of very pointy teeth. An old turtle mostly sat in a dark corner, giving off a depressed and resigned air, while the smaller turtle hung around, liking to have its underside scratched by Matt.

Our second dive took us into the - colder at 14C - Kelp tank, housing large schools of sea fish, a small shark and lots of sea anemones, From the outside it is fascinating, brown fronds swaying back and forth in the water, schools of silvery fish moving past the window, beautiful. Once in the tank it was a bit more confusing. Despite being only 12x12 meters, the rocks and kelp make the space disorienting, as we swam around new spaces revealed themselves, new angles and views. We had a chance to feed frozen pilchard halves to the fish in this tank, unlike the predator tank it was actually safe to do so here without the danger of loosing a finger, these fish being less aggressive - and having smaller mouths. Nevertheless there was quite a bit of jostling and nudging when the food appeared. One large wrasse in particular , a real bruiser, all shiny and silver, just snapped half a pilchard out of my hand. It disappeared without a trace. The smaller fish were a little more dainty, taking bites off the snack held out to them.

Karoo to Cape Town

We seemed to have done nothing but rush since we left Johannesburg on Tuesday. We headed towards Lesotho, crossed into the Karoo and dashed across the veld, passing three National Parks. We even visited one and stayed the night in another. Unfortunately Addo, where we were going to see elephants (Elephants!!!) got dropped off the list due to not enough time. The problem is still the fact that my visa is about to run out, and although I keep saying that I don't mind trying to cross the border into Namibia with an expired visa (what's the worst that can happen, I get thrown out?!?!) we are still on a roll to get to the border, leaving beautiful sights like the Garden Route, Oyster Festival, Cape Town museums, in the dust. Ho hum.

We did see some lovely sights, though, so it's not all been rush rush rush: We drove through the endless and lonely Karoo, where the windmills pull up what little water there is to feed the skinny cows and water the occasional ostrich farm. The landscape is sparse and wild, also freezing cold at this time of year. Mountain Zebra National Park was a bit of a find, a small area that holds the other kind of zebra found in South Africa, as opposed to the more common Burchell's Zebra. These guys are more chunky and a lot more shy, but they seemed to get on well with the Red Hartebeest and Blesboks, the Black Wildebeest and Oryx we saw there. We were also lucky to catch sight of a Black-backed Jackal as he crossed the road, stopped to give us the evil eye and them loped off into the high grasses. There were also vervet monkeys and baboons messing about, picking food off the ground while the kids generally made a nuisance of themselves pushing each other off branches. This was Merryl's first African wildlife experience, so there was much photographing and squealing. That night we fetched up in Addo, but not the elephant park, rather a one horse town, nothing more than a police station and a dusty shop with a petrol pump attached. We had a taste of African supermarket simplicity, as the only veggies on sale were potatoes, squash and pumpkins, plus a pallid-looking range of import tomatoes that had been sitting in a cooler for too long. The rest of the shop was filled with dusty tins and bashed washing powder boxes along with fridges filled with sugary drinks (what is it about the fizzy drink consumption in these parts?) and processed cheese. Other than that the take-away counter held mangled pies of indeterminate providence and chemically enhanced cakes. The caravan park we stayed in was run by an Afrikaans couple with a penchant for crazy garden statuary. It was hard to walk for the nymphs stretching after a nap, gnomes sitting on benches, and dog figures marking the burial spot of the owner's favourite pet. There was surprising amount of racket after dark, although the town didn't look capable of producing so much engine noise, there were shunting trains and breaking lorries all night. Yesterday we climbed down from the chilly heights of the Karoo towards the famous garden route. The landscape changed completely: all day a line of hills followed us on our right, first as a row of distinct peaks, pointed like the line on a heart rate monitor, later joining together, growing ever higher into a cloud capped range. On our left we occasionally glimpsed the Indian Ocean, its coast line frequently marred by retirement villages. The land went from brown and spare to lush and green, the light from harsh bright to cloudy grey, easier on the eye after days of relentless blue skies. At one point the sun came out of the clouds to make a milky white, translucent light, smearing soft charcoal shadows on the green fields. We also had the first rain of the trip, a smattering sweetened by a faint rainbow over our left shoulder. The country here reminds me of the Wairarapa coast, cloudy hills and empty farms; or the Scottish lowlands, a comforting landscape, easy for us Europeans to understand. There are of course still townships by the roadside, and black fruit pickers slogging home from work, and remote Boer farms, but at least we can understand the shape of the land.

Incongruous signage in Cape Town

Going through my photos from the trip to Cape Town a few weeks ago I came across these. The race debate here is informed from a different place, it seems:

Nelson Mandela, political prisoner for decades, remembered in the same place as Cecil Rhodes, imperialist and racist.

A hipper than hip boutique on Long Street.

Cape Town scraps

Too much is happening at once right now to keep up the flow of news. Cape Town is already almost two weeks ago, so here are some bits worth mentioning:

I am in love with its chilled atmosphere, the shady benches at Company Gardens right in the middle of the city; the ambitious exhibitions at the Art Museum; Charly's and the German Dinkel bakery - two businesses on either end of the baked goods spectrum, both perfectly formed; the not at all tacky V&A waterfront, which could so easily have gone wrong, but is surprisingly entertaining; baboons and seals right there in town; the incredible Aquarium - can't wait to dive with the sharks there; its similarity to Wellington which I miss terribly (not the crap autumn weather that they're probably having by now, though).

After Joburg and the constant warnings to watch your back - and your bag - I found myself wary to the point of paranoia walking the streets. I felt silly since certainly the CBD is perfectly harmless. Makes me wonder what is possible in Joburg CBD if one would just dare walk there.

Lesson learnt: when driving past a group of baboons, keep your windows up and don't leave the car. As we watched another car was invaded by a mother/child team of apish thiefs who emptied a stolen bag into the road in search for food only to bare their over-sized canines at anyone daring to take their loot off them.