July 6 Reflections on Cape Town

So many things struck me about Cape Town that I don’t know in what order to describe them. First; it is a beautiful metropolitan city with all the class of the best cities in the world. I think the thing that struck me the most was how clean the city is. No graffiti and I mean close to none as you can imagine. This amongst a city filled with unemployed and homeless people everywhere. Now don’t say we didn’t go to the right places, we were at the train station, the waterfront, the township areas and nowhere was there graffiti. I commented to our guide and she said everybody who visits mentions this fact. Townships are the areas that people make shanties to live in; they go on for miles and miles in some areas. Along the road to the airport they stretch for 14 kilometers. Sad, but from the pictures I’ve seen they paint and furnish these little havens and make a home from them, most being 12 feet square.
But it is a city of have and have not. Our guide said that unemployment in the area was 40%, I didn’t have time to check that fact but there were plenty of people standing on the streets begging. It is estimated that the townships in and around Cape Town hold over a million people. On the other side we saw a reality paper with ads that had no houses under a million dollars.
The citizens are concerned since the new government was elected. The current President is allowing any and all refugees from Zimbabwe free access for 3 months without papers. How they expect to get these people out of the country after three months is anyone’s guess.
The food was my next surprise. The crustaceans along the Western edge of South Africa are to die for. I’ve eaten in so many restaurants along the Mediterranean and now I have had several dinners of Western African cold water lobster, prawns, langoustines, oysters and other fresh fish that I’m not convinced it’s better than the Mediterranean. I also had Zebra and Warthog last night and was surprised how good it was.
Enough for today, we have boarded the Rovos train and have begun what seems like another incredible journey, more on that later.