South Africa Day One

This is the first part of South Africa, I imagine it will be 3 or 4, not sure yet.
I woke up nice and early for the sunrise over South Africa and was not disappointed. It was probably the most colorful one yet and table mountain looked great in the distance. I had a SAS trip to a township planned for the afternoon which left a little bit of time in the morning to do whatever assuming the ship was cleared in good time. We decided that if we were off anytime before about 10:30 that we would try and do table mountain that morning and fortunately the ship was good to go at 9:30. It was the first port where we had to do absolutely nothing with immigration and had no consulate visit. Our group of 5, Eric, Lindsay, JulieAnne, Laurie, and myself were I think literally the first ones off of the ship. We hopped in a cab and got to table mountain in no time where we were greeted by a huge line just to get tickets to take the cable car up. A lot of people hike it, but since we were on a time crunch that wasn’t an option. We waited in line for about 45 minutes, bought our tickets, waited another 45 minutes to get on the cable car and we were off. The ride up was pretty awesome, the car spins 360 degrees during the ride and it gives a great view of Cape Town. Once up top we walked around a bit and took pictures up there from both sides. The view was stunning and well worth the trip. To anyone who goes to Cape Town in the future, table mountain is a must do in my opinion. Plus it is hard to get up there when it is windy or cloudy, so if you have the chance, do it. We ate at the restaurant up top which was actually reasonably priced. I had a meat pizza, which tasted like pizza crust with sloppy joe mix on top of it. Given that I like sloppy joes though, that was fine by me. We realized that we only had about 45 minutes until our trip left from the ship, so we hopped on the cable car back down, got in a cab, and motored off.
After changing clothes and grabbing my ticket, I hopped on the bus to go to the township. We were visiting the Kyaletsha township (I butchered the daylights out of that spelling), which is one of the bigger ones in Cape Town. Something like 2 million people live there in houses that are little more than cardboard and tin slapped together. The lucky ones set up shop or house in old shipping containers. Many had electricity, albeit illegally since they would just climb power lines, strip the wire, and tap into it. We would later find out that the government actually builds cinderblock houses free for all of these people, the waiting list is just so long that they have to live temporarily in the townships. Many have been waiting more than a decade for their turn to come. We first stopped at a market type thing where they had jewelry and some other crafty things that we could buy. I got a painting and had a picture taken with the artist. He was very thankful for the business and I was glad to help. I have all kinds of artwork now from the countries I’ve visited that I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do with, but it is a good problem to have. There was also an awesome band that was playing drums and xylophone there for us and children outside that we had a chance to play with. The children in the township LOVED having their pictures taken. They would make all kinds of funny poses, you take their picture, and then they push and shove to see it on the screen. Most of them don’t have mirrors and I imagine it is a rare occasion to be able to see their own face like that.
Our next stop was to a small building where women were employed weaving and printing. They take recycled t-shirts, cut them into strips, and weave these beautiful rugs and wall hangings out of them. We also saw a kindergarten classroom next door and got to play with some more kids who again loved to have their pictures taken. From there we left and headed to Vicki’s Bed and Breakfast, perhaps one of the more famous businesses in Cape Town. Vicki was a middle aged woman who in the late 90’s decided to open a B&B to attract visitors to the township and teach them a bit about life there. Since then she has expanded to like 6 rooms and has one of the nicer homes in the township. She has hosted visitors from all over the world and in doing so hopes they will go back to their home countries and talk about the townships, getting help for them. Many visitors go there just to see poverty and don’t respect the people living, and Vicki’s goal is to change that. She spoke to us for about 10 minutes and let us look around. I have a lot of respect for her and had heard about her from blogs of previous voyagers. I took down her address and hope to send her school supplies from the states. She collects them for the children of the township and distributes them so that they can have a proper education. One of her points was that giving them money does no good, it only encourages them to beg, but by giving them tools to gain an education, you are doing them a bigger favor than you can imagine. We took more pictures with kids outside of Vicki’s then piled into the bus to head to another B&B for snacks.
The second one was Konanong Guest House, which literally means meeting place. Meho and Ehope Leakau were the two ladies who ran it, the elder of which was quite the entrepreneur. She actually had a degree in urban planning I believe and had many years of work with non profit organizations and some time studying in Pittsburgh on a fellowship. Despite having the education and resources to probably get out of Africa to greener pastures, she chose to come back and start businesses to help out the local economy. She had a B&B which was a similar size to Vicki’s and also owned her own taxi company. She contracted local women to bake goods for her guests and create crafts for sale at her guest house and at local markets. She also hosts meetings with others interested in starting B&Bs and through her and Vicki’s model, something like 18 have now opened in that township alone. She said it all started when she started to see visitors coming through after apartheid ended in the early 90’s. They would come on busses, cameras in hand, but would never get off. She said it was very disrespectful to the people and that they loved visitors but wanted them to actually visit a township, not treat it like a zoo. Through her efforts now pretty much all visits to the townships come with walking tours and home visits to see what life is actually like. The goal is education not tourism.
We left her B&B, did a walk around the block observing the people and the living conditions. It was amazing to me how the people here were probably poorer than even India and yet were all full of smiles. Here they were living in homes that most of us could probably have purchased for less than the cash we had in our wallets, and they were extremely happy. I think there is a lot to be learned from them honestly. We got back on the bus and headed to the ship. No one was very hungry so we grabbed dinner on the ship to save money. I honestly can’t remember what I did to kill the next two hours, probably wandered around the mall outside the ship, but we met up with some people at about 8:30 to go grab a late dinner in some cases and just hang out in ours. We ended up playing pool for a couple of hours at this one place which was tons of fun. The balls were smaller than in the US for some reason, but we managed. After that we headed to a bar which was flooded with SAS people and I wasn’t a huge fan, so before long I bailed back to the ship to get some sleep before our safari the next morning.