Sep 20, 2022
The Walking Tour:
We were going on a walking tour of our part of Cape Town. It would be about three hours of walking, so I brought some snacks. We took an uber to a coffee shop where we would meet him. He was sitting at a table right next to the door. His name was Rico. He was friendly, and I liked him. We got hot chocolates, and mom and dad got a coffee. He told us about himself and where he was from. He was in the apartheid era when he was a kid, so he knew by experience. When he was a kid, he attended school protests and was shot four times when he was eleven. He was shot by police in his head, back, leg, and arm. The shots were buckshot, so they did not kill him but only hurt a lot. Buckshot is little shards of metal that get logged in your skin. So he knew by experience. He would show us all the places and tell us about them while walking. In the end, he would take us to a museum and let us look around. We would have limited time in the future because mom had to get on a call. He took us to a market called the Green Square Market. It had lots of shops and things I wanted to buy, but we had to keep walking, so I didn’t. He told us that each of the stines that we were walking on was touched by an enslaved person. Enslaved people built the whole city of Cape Town. He showed us Desmon Tutu’s church and the spot where he stood to lead the protests. Next to the coffee shop was a piece of the berlin wall that the president of Germany had given to Nelson Mandela when he visited. The time seemed to fly by, and we soon arrived at the museum. He told us that his wife (who was white and he was black) had been ridiculed and even arrested because her dad was pushing back against the apartheid. She was even more ridiculed because she married a black man. We went to a special exhibit in the museum that was about his wife. She had an older sister named Lynn, who wrote a book about her experience. She also had a younger brother named John. The exhibit was excellent, and I learned a lot. She told about one night when her parents left to go to a house they were not allowed to go to. A man came over and demanded to know where her parents were. She did not tell him but was scared.
I had a few rice cakes, so I ate those. We were to meet him back at the cafe where we first met him. When we came in, he was waiting in the same spot. We said our goodbyes. and then headed back. Today was our last shopping day, so when we returned, the watershed (a mall) was where we went. We all had some money, and so I looked around. I and KB wanted to do this kid’s fun park thing since we had gotten to Cape Town, so we decided it was the right time to do it. It was about six dollars for one hour, so we did that. The giant wooden maze was above our heads, and some little kid things were on the main floor. Since I and KB could only fit in the overhead one, we went up there. It was fantastic, getting to climb around and hide in secret places. I and KB pretended that we were in a spy school, so that was cool. The time seemed to fly as we crawled around, and soon we had to leave. The person who checked us in was really nice and talked with KB a lot. When we got out, we went to look at all the shops a little more but then Emmy texted and said that we would go up to the mountain right then. I had my backpack with me, and good thing it had a sweater and a puffy jacket; otherwise, I would be freezing.
Table Mountain:
We were going to take the tram up and not hike. We took an uber to the tram base, and then the tram went up. We went up at like 6:45, so we could see the sunset. There were mini hikes you could do from the top. We did not do any of those, but we did go to an excellent spot to take a family photo. We got a few, one with the whole family, one of the kids, and one of mom and dad. We walked back to the tram house thingy and waited for the sun to set. A message blared from a horn saying that the last tram car would leave a seven. It was like 6:55, so we had little time. But right then, a massive crowd of people came shuffling toward us, and then we decided it was time to go. We rushed to get in the tram car and were one of the first people to get in. We went down, and I captured some great photage of the sun hitting the rocks and the ocean.
We got to the bottom and ordered a uber, and then drove down. We were thankfully not going out to dinner, but just had pasta at home. I thought it was an extremely fun visit up Table Mountain.