Friday, 30 November 2012

Cape Town, Llandudno

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There's little development between Camps Bay and the exclusive cove of Llandudno, 20km from Cape Town along Victoria Road - not served by public transport.

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Here a steep and narrow road winds down past smart homes to the shore, where the sandy beach is punctuated at either end by magnificent granite boulders and rock formations.

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This is a good sunbathing spot and a choice one for bring-your-own sundowners.
The small car park frequently spills over into the suburban streets at peak periods.

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Thursday, 29 November 2012

Cape Town, Woodstock

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First and oldest of the suburbs as you take an easterly exit from town is Woodstock, unleafy and windblown, but redeemed by some nice Victorian buildings, originally occupied by working-class coloured, and now gentrifying and home to arty folk.

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The focus of the revival is the Old Biscuit Mill in Albert Road with its terrific Saturday-morning market where you can eat your fill, wander about craft shops and visit art galleries.

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Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Cape Town, Houses of Parliament

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South Africa's Houses of Parliament, on Parliament Street, are a complex of interlinking buildings, with labyrinthine corridors connecting hundreds of offices, debating chambers and miscellaneous other rooms.

Many of these are relics of the 1980s reformist phase of apartheid when, in the interests of racial segregation, there were three distinct legislative complexes sited here to cater to different "races".

The original wing, completed in 1885, is an imposing Victorian Neoclassical building that first served as the legislative assembly of the Cape Colony.

After the Boer republics and British colonies amalgamated in 1910, it became the Parliament of the Union of South Africa.

This is the old Parliament, where over seven decades of repressive legislation, including apartheid laws, were passed.


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The new chamber was built in 1983 as part of the tricameral parliament.
P.W. Botha's attempt to avert majority rule by trying to co-opt Indians and coloured - but in their own separate debating chambers.

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The "tricameral" chamber, where the three non-African races on occasions met together, is now the National Assembly, where you can watch sessions of parliament.
One-hour tours leave from the Plein Street entrance to Parliament.

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Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Iziko Slave Lodge

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At the top corner of Adderley Street, just as it veers sharply northwest into Wale Street, The Slave Lodge was built in 1679 to house the human chattles of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) - the largest single slaveholder at the Cape.

For nearly two centuries - more than half the city's existence as an urban settlement  - Cape Town's economic and social structures 
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rested on slavery.

By the 1770s, almost a thousand slaves were held at the lodge.

Under VOC administration the lodge also became the Cape Colony's main brothel, its doors thrown open to all comers for an hour each night.

In 1810 the British administration decided to use the lodge as the Supreme Court, a function it retained for over a century.

To clear out the government-owned slaves, it auctioned most off to private individuals, while the remaining two hundred were moved to smaller accomodation in the Company's Gardens, where they remained until they were freed in 1827, nearly ten years earlier than the rest of the slaves at the Cape.

From 1914, the building was used as government offices, and now houses an 
exhibition, still evolving, about slavery.

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Taking an audio headset allows you to follow the footsteps of German salt trader Otto Menzl as he is taken on a tour of the lodge in the 1700s, which gives you a good idea of the miserable conditions at the time.

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Monday, 26 November 2012

Cape Town, Hout Bay & Sandy Bay

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Although no longer the quaint fishing village it once was, Hout Bay still has a functioning fishing harbour and is the centre of the local crayfish industry.

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Some 20 km from the centre, it's a favourite day outing, and despite ugly modern development and a growing shantytown, the natural setting is quite spectacular, with the Sentinel and Chapman's Peak defining the entry to the bay.

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Highly unusual for Cape Town with its legacy of apartheid town planning, poor black areas nose right up to wealthy white ones.

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Isolated Sandy Bay, Cape Town's main nudist beach, can only be reached via a twenty minutes walk from Llandudno; a signposted path leads from the south end of the Llandudnocar park.

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In the apartheid days, the South African Police went to ingenious lenghts to trap nudists, but nowadays the beach is relaxed, so feel free to come as undressed as feels comfortable.
It's a prime gay cruising spot too.

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Sunday, 25 November 2012

Iziko South African National Gallery

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The South African National Gallery is an essential port of call for anyone interested in the local art scene, and includes a small but excellent permanent collection of contemporary South African art.
Be sure to take in Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys sculpure, which figuratively portrays South Africa's inherent menace and violence.

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You'll also find a fine display of traditional works from the southeast of the continent, based around a small collection donated by the German government.

The exhibits, which include beadwork, carvings and craft objects, were chosen for their aesthetic qualities and rarity, and represent the gallery's policy of focusing on neglected parts of South Africa's heritage.

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In addition, another room contains minor works by British artists including George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, as well as some Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

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The gallery has a café serving light lunches and snacks, as well as an excellent craft shop selling embroidered textiles, basketry, wire products and fine beadwork from South Africa.

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Saturday, 24 November 2012

Cape Town, Bantry Bay

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At the westernmost edge of Sea Point lies Bantry Bay, combining the density of Sea Point with the wealth of the Atlantic suburbs; mansions rake back from the Atlantic shore on steep slopes, guarded by the granite boulders of Lion's Head.

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The upmarket resort hotels and self-catering apartments blocks are just far enough for comfort from the hubbub of Sea Point, but close enough should you want to walk to a restaurant.

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Friday, 23 November 2012

Robben Island, the prison's tour

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The ferry trip from the Waterfront takes about half an hour to reach the island.
After arrival you are taken on a bus tour around the island and a tour of prison.
The bus tour stops off at several historical landmarks, the first of which is a beautiful shrine built in memory of Tuan Guru, a Muslim cleric from present-day Indonesia who was imprisoned here by Dutch in the eighteenth century. On his release, he helped to establish Islam among slaves in Cape Town.


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The tour also passes a leper graveyard and church designed by Sir Herbert Baker.

Robert Sobukwe's house is perhaps the most affecting relic of incarceration on the island.
It was here that Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (a radical offshoot of the ANC), was held in solitary confinement for nine years.
No other political prisoners were allowed to speak to him, but he would sometimes gesture his solidarity with them by letting sand trickle through his fingers as they walked past.
After his release in 1969, Sobukwe was restricted to Kimberley under house arrest, until his death from cancer in 1978.

Another stopoff is the lime quarry where Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates spent countless hours of hard labour.

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The Maximum Security Prison, a forbidding complex of unadorned H-blocks on the edge of the island, is introduced with a tour through the famous B-section; you'll be guided by a former inmate, after which you're free to wander.
Mandela's cell has been left exactly as it was, without embellishments or display, but the rest have been left locked and empty.

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In the nearby A-section, the "Cell Stories" exhibition skilfully suggests the sparseness of prison life; the tiny isolation cells contain personal artefacts loaned by former prisoners, plus quotations, recordings and photographs.
Towards the end of the 1980s, cameras were sneaked onto the island, and inmates took snapshots of each other, which have been enlarged to almost life size and mounted as the Smuggled Camera Exhibition in the D-section communal cells.

The Living Legacy tour in F-section involves ex-political prisoners guides describing their lives here and answering your question.

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Thursday, 22 November 2012

Robben Island, the history

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Lying only a few kilometres from the commerce of the Waterfront, flat and windswept Robben Island is suffused by a meditative , otherworldly silence.

This key site of South Africa's liberation struggle was intended to silence apartheid's domestic critics, but instead became an international focus for opposition to the regime.

Measuring six square kilometres and sparsely vegetated by low scrub, it was Nelson Mandela's "home" for nearly two decades.

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Nelson Mandela is the most famous Robben Island prisoner, but he wasn't the first.
In the seventeenth century, the island became a place of banishment for those who offended the political order.
The island's first prisoner was the indigenous Khoikoi leader Autshumato, who learnt English in the early seventeenth century and became an emissary of the British.
After the Dutch settlement was established, he was jailed on the island by Jan van Riebeeck in 1658 for murdering a Dutch herder and stealing his cattle.

The rest of the seventeenth century saw a succession of East Indies political prisoners exiled here for opposing Dutch colonial rule.

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During the nineteenth century, the British used the island as a dumping ground for deserters, criminals and political prisoners.
Captured Xhosa leaders who defied the empire during the Frontier Wars of the early to mid-nineteenth century were transported by sea from the Eastern Cape to be imprisoned here.

In 1846, the island's brief was extended to include a whole range of the socially marginalized: criminals and political detainees were joined by vagrants, prostitutes, lunatics and the chronically ill.
In the 1890s, a leper colony existed alongside the social outcasts.
Lunatics were removed in 1921 and the lepers in 1930.

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Robben Island's greatest era of notoriety began in 1961, when it was taken over by the Prison Department

When Nelson Mandela arrived, it had become a maximum security prison, and prisoners were only allowed to send and receive one letter every six months.
Harsh conditions, including routine beatings and forced hard labour, were exacerbated by geographical location: icy winds routinely blow in from the South Pole, and inmates wore only shorts and flimsy yerseys.
Like every other prisoner, Mandela slept on a thin mat on the floor and was kept in solitary confinement in a cell measuring two metres square for sixteen hours a day.

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Amazingly, the prisoners found ways of protesting, through hunger strikes, publicizing conditions when possible (by visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, for example ) and, remarkably, by taking legal action against the prison authority to stop arbitrary punishments.

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They won improved conditions over the years, and the island also became a university behind bars, where people of different political views and generation met; it ws not unknown for prisoners to give academic help to their warders.

The last political prisoners were released from Robben Island in 1991 and the remaining common-law prisoners were transferred to the mainland in 1996.

On January 1, 1997, control of Robben Island was transferred from the Department of Correctional Services to the Department of the Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which has now established it as a museum.

In December 1999, the entire island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Cape Town, Fish Hoek Beach

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Fish Hoek, south of Kalk Bay, boasts one of the peninsula's finest family beaches along the False Bay coast.

The best and safest swimming is at its southern end, where the surf is moderately warm, tame and much enjoyed by boogie boarders.

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Thanks to the beach, there's a fair amount of accomodation, but this is otherwise one of the dreariest suburbs along the False Bay coast.

An obscure bylaw banning the sale of alcohol in supermarkets or bottle stores boosts the town's image as the Mother Grundy capital of the peninsula.

From the west side of the beach, Jager's Walk skirts the rocky shoreline above the sea for 1 km to Sunny Cove; from there, it continues for 6 km as an unpaved track to Simon's Town.

The walkway provides a good vantage point for seeing whales.

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Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Cape Town, Kommetjie

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Although only a few kilometres south of Noordhoek along the beach, getting to the tiny settlement of Kommetjie by road involves a fifteen-kilometre detour inland.

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Facilities are limited and one of the main reasons to come here is for the superb walks, either around the rocky shore near Slangkop lighthouse, or across the extensive sands of Long Beach towards Noordhoek.
The beach walk takes you past the well-preserved wreck of the Kakapo, which ran aground in 1900 and whose boiler, rudders and ribs are still visible above the sands.

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The Kakapo had a bit-part in the David Lean film Ryan's Daughter, where Long Beach stood in for the windswept Irish coast in some scenes.
Another major draw of Kommetjie is its powerful surf, though riding the waves in these parts is only for the very experienced.
If you want to learn to surf, Muizenberg is the place.

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Monday, 19 November 2012

Cape Town, Long Street

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Parallel to Adderley Street, buzzing one-way Long Street is one of Cape Town's most diverse thoroughfares, best known as the city's main nightlife strip.
When it was first settled by Nuslims some three hundred years ago, Long Street marked Cape Town's boundary; by the 1960s, it had become a sleazy thoroughfare of drinking holes and whorehouses.

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Miraculously, it's all still here, but with a whiff of gentrification and a rather boring section of discount furniture shops and fast-food joints; it deserves exploration from the Wale Street intersection onwards.

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Mosques still coexist with bars, dagga (weed), is readily available, and antique dealers, craft shops, bookshops and cafés do a good trade.
The street is packed with backpacker hostels and a couple of upmarket hotels, though it can be very noisy into the early hours from the nightclubs.

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At night it's safe enough to pub or club crawl, and you'll always be able to find taxis.
Street vendors sell boerewors rolls and from 8 pm till the early hours music blares from Mohammed's Street schwarma stand.

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