Cape Town and Environs Part 1 — Flowers and Views

Rishi and I spent September 21 through 28 in and around Cape Town, South Africa, a trip that showed us why the Mother City, as it’s known to South Africans, frequently appears on lists of the world’s most beautiful places. We got a great taste of what the area has to offer — too much for a single blog entry — so I've broken this into parts:
Part 1 — Flowers and Views (this entry)
Part 2 — District Six, Townships, and Robben Island
Part 3 — Ancient Rock Art
Part 4 — Whales and Wine

U.S. friends, if you are thinking of visiting Southern Africa, I highly recommend including some time in the Cape Town area on your itinerary. Maybe we can rendezvous with you because I certainly wouldn't mind going there again. 

The view of Cape Town from the Robben Island ferry, with Table Mountain at the left and Signal hill at the right, is lovely, even on a cloudy day.  

After flying from Gaborone to Johannesburg and then on to Cape Town, we picked up our rental car and drove straight to the West Coast, which in this case is the Atlantic Coast, where we would spend our first few days searching for South Africa’s renowned August and September spring wildflower display. 

Source: http://www.bcb.uwc.ac.za/inforeep/capeproject.htm

The Western Cape is home to the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which among the six defined global floristic kingdoms is the smallest in size at only 78,555 sq km, about the size of South Carolina. Despite its small size — it only takes up the southeastern edge of South Africa — the Cape Floristic Kingdom contains more than 9,000 plant species, of which about 68% are endemic. Unfortunately, it’s also been listed as a “biodiversity hotspot,” meaning that its significant biodiversity is under threat from humans. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Floristic_Region, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_hotspot.)

During the trip, I learned that plants originating in the Western Cape include birds of paradise, gerbera daisies, gladiolus, calla lilies, clivia, pelargonium, and protea, not to mention a huge array of ericas (heathers), succulents, and ice plants. We knew we were a little late for the peak of the flowers and also didn’t travel quite as far north as Namaqualand, the area which is supposed to be literally blanketed with flowers in August. Nonetheless, we enjoyed beautiful scenery and definitely saw lots of flowers as our pictures attest.

This collage highlights a few examples of the many plants originating in the Cape Floristic Kingdom. King protea (lower right), the  largest of the genus protea, is South Africa's national flower. 

We spent the first night, Friday, in Langebaan, a town along a beautiful inlet. En route there, we also took a quick drive though the West Coast National Park, though twilight kept us from lingering. Saturday, continuing northward, we spent the morning driving along the coast to Paternoster before heading inland to Citrusdal, where we spent the next couple of nights. Citrusdal is the heart of South Africa’s orange growing region, so the smell of orange blossoms fills the air, especially in the evenings.  

Paternoster's beautiful beach with whitewashed homes.

Citrusdal sits at the foot of the Cedarburg mountains, which provide
 a beautiful backdrop to the orange-tree filled valley.

Sunday saw us driving northward again, en route to Clanwilliam, a small agricultural town, and then over a pass through the mountains to a spot called Sevilla, where we spent the afternoon walking along a trail that accesses rock paintings created by San bushmen, the area’s original inhabitants. See http://rjabroad.blogspot.com/2014/10/ancient-rock-art-in-south-africa.html.

Monday it was on to Cape Town, about a two hour drive south. We arrived at our hotel at midday, and the first priority was taking the cable car up Table Mountain. The weather was partly cloudy and cool, but as the forecast for the next few days called for worsening clouds and rain, we knew this might be our best chance to see Table Mountain without the blanket of clouds, known as the table cloth, which frequently comes in from the sea and cloaks the mountain.  

The cable car ride to the top of Table Mountain is special in its own right, but the views from atop the mountain are the real draw, even on a cloudy day. 

We spent a full day Tuesday touring historic sites from South Africa’s apartheid era. See http://rjabroad.blogspot.com/2014/10/cape-town-and-environs-part-2-district.html.

Over our last two days in Cape Town, we continued our exploration of the natural beauty of the Cape Peninsula. We spent one day driving along the Atlantic coast, headed south on the peninsula that looks like a hooked finger extending south from Cape Town. At the end of the peninsula is the Cape Point Nature Preserve. 

At Cape Point Nature reserve, we visited the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point, respectively the southwestern most and southeastern most points on the peninsula. We hiked up to the lighthouse at Cape Point to enjoy the views. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the southern most point on the African continent, which is in fact at Cape Agulhas, about three hours drive southeast from Cape Town. 

Wildflowers in the Cape Point Nature Reserve.

On the return trip, we drove along the other side of the peninsula, beside the Indian Ocean coastline. We stopped for lunch and wine tasting at Groot Costantia, one of the oldest wineries in Africa. 

Finally, on our last day in Cape Town, we capped off our stay there with a visit to the world renowned

Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, with its magnificent setting nestled against the back of Table Mountain. We took a fabulous two-hour walk through the garden's highlights with a volunteer docent who told us that the wildflowers were are at their peak.

Rishi with wildflowers at Kirstenbosch.

This bird, a Cape Francolin I think, also seems to be admiring the wildflowers. 

Photos from the Kirstenbosch protea garden show a selection of the many protea types we saw there. 

Kirstenbosch has a large collection of cycads, a plant type that
dates back to the Jurassic era and is little changed since that time. 

Egyptian geese at Kirstenbosch. 

For the blog on our last two days in the area, visiting the Whale Coast and Franschhoek, see http://rjabroad.blogspot.com/2014/10/cape-town-and-environs-part-4-whales.html. 

Cape Town and Environs Part 4 – Whales and Wine

We bid Cape Town farewell as we drove southeast to Hermanus on the whale coast. Southern right whales travel from Antarctic waters to South Africa where from June until November they give birth and raise their young calves in warmer waters. 

Rishi caught this shot of a whale jumping off the coast in Hermanus. 

En route to Hermanus, we stopped at
Betty's Bay to visit the penguin colony there. 

Upon arrival at the guest house where we would be staying, we learned that a mother whale and her calf had been jumping and playing in the inlet right in front of the guest house. Later in the afternoon they were back, as shown above left, though a bit far away. 

These are dassies, lounging on the rocks in Hermanus.  

Still more beautiful coastline and more flowers too.

Hermanus sunset

The last leg of our trip was a visit to Franschhoek, within one of the main wine growing regions of South Africa. The town was hosting a weekend-long festival, Franschhoek Uncorked. We purchased festival tickets for about $10 each that entitled us to tastings at 20 wineries, plus a souvenir glass. 

In two days, we visited 11 of 20 wineries that were participating in the Franschhoek Uncorked festival. Whew!
It's hard work, but someone has to do it. 

La Bri has beautiful labels with sketches of flowers, and I love the way
the bottles were hanging from tress outside the tasting room. 

The wineries are close together, so it’s quick and easy to travel from one to the next. The area is beautiful with mountains rising steeply from the valley, and each winery seeming even more lovely than the one before. 

The aptly named Dieu Donné (God gave) has a beautiful view and a lovely tasting room. 

Rishi is admiring the view from Lynx Wines.

Plaisir de Merle, yet another beautiful winery, looks like a painting. 

We did try a lot of good wine, but given the bargain price for the weekend tastings, most of the wineries weren’t pouring their best products. Or you could try them, but for an added cost. And by the end of the day, our fellow tasters, who seemed to be going for full tastes rather than just sipping and using the spittoons as we were doing, were definitely getting pretty rowdy. One of the folks pouring wine told us that many students from the nearby college town of Stellenbosch were probably enjoying the wines a bit too much. 

Rainbow over Franschhoek

Note the solar panels in the middle of the Vrede En Lust vineyards.

While many of the wines that we tasted while in the Cape Town area were excellent, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed by the food. Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe I’m just a horribly spoiled food snob. None of the restaurants that we ate at in Cape Town were super fabulous, despite several having high marks on various best of Cape Town lists. The seafood was fine and very fresh, but the way it was prepared and presented wasn’t particularly inventive. 
Franschhoek is billed as the culinary center of South Africa, and we did have a good, but not outstanding meal at Reuben’s, the restaurant of celebrity chef Reuben Riffel. We were only in Franschhoek one night, so didn’t check out the Tasting Table, which is frequently cited as the best restaurant in South Africa. Again, I’m thinking maybe next time. See you in Cape Town!

Cape Town and Environs Part 2 - District Six, Townships, and Robben Island

While in Cape Town, Rishi and I spent a full day touring historic sites from South Africa’s apartheid era. The tour provided us with insights into ongoing division of the country by race and class, but also the tremendous progress that has occurred in just 20 years since apartheid ended.  

In the morning, we took a guided tour through District Six, an area that had been home to a diverse community of colored (mixed-race) people until, under the Group Areas Act, it was reclassified as white in 1966. Though the government claimed District Six was a slum, most likely the real reason for its reclassification was its desirable prime location close to Cape Town’s city center. Between 1968 and 1982, the original homes were destroyed and all District Six inhabitants were relocated to township areas. Today, District Six houses the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, but very little housing as political pressure prevented the apartheid government from building there. The South African government in 2003 began building new homes that are available only to people who can document that their families originally lived in District Six. 

At the District Six Museum, we viewed exhibits on what life had been like in the District. Other exhibits provided the testimony of former residents on how relocation disrupted the fabric of their community and forced them to move from decent housing, close to their employment, into very rudimentary housing within the remote townships in the Cape Flats, which required long commutes into Cape Town. 

This floor in the District Six museum is covered by this map showing the District's former streets. People who once lived there have written on the map to show the location of their homes. 

We then drove to see several of those townships in the Cape Flats area, which were defined under apartheid as black or colored areas. Our guide for the tour still lives in one of these townships, Lhanga, and I have the impression that he and his family stay because they’ve been able to purchase and improve their homes and also because they feel tied to family and community there. However, many of the townships areas are definitely impoverished slums. For example, apartheid era hostels (dormitories), originally built for male workers, now have entire families living in spaces that were once intended only for one or two men, and multiple families share limited kitchen and toilet facilities. 

This beautiful girl is a student at the Philani center that we
visited. It's one of several such centers in the townships
where children attend preschool and receive nutritional
support, while their mothers receive training about
improving family nutrition and also are employed as weavers
 and fabric painters. (See http://philaniusa.org/index.php.)

In other places, such as Khayelitsha and Crossroads townships, people live in row upon row of shanties constructed of whatever materials are available, such as wood, cardboard, corrugated metal, and plastic. Our guide told us that fires frequently breakout in these areas because of the kerosene used for cooking and the highly flammable materials, but firefighters have a hard time accessing the homes to extinguish the fires because the homes are packed so closely together. We didn’t take many photos here, as it was so heartbreaking, but google "Khayelitsha South Africa" if you are interested in seeing photos. 

What a contrast the touristy V&A Wharf, with its perfectly maintained
historic buildings and modern shopping malls, is
to the township areas we had just visited. 

In the afternoon, our morning guide dropped us at the Victoria and Albert Wharf, where we waited for the ferry to Robben Island. Just 45 minutes from Cape Town by boat, this is where Nelson Mandela served at hard labor for 18 of his 27 years as a political prisoner. Many other leaders of the struggle against apartheid were imprisoned there as well.

The gate to the Robben Island prison reminded me of the infamous
Auschwitz gate, above which the Nazis wrote "Abeit Macht Frei" -- work makes free.

Our guide at the Robben Island prison, himself a former prisoner there, described what prison life was like. The exhibit at the left shows the daily rations each prisoner received, which in the wisdom of the apartheid regime, varied depending upon a prisoner's ethnic/tribal group.  

The bars of Nelson Mandela's cell. 

A few days later, while in Franschhoek on the last day of our trip , we stopped by the entrance of Drakenstein Correctional Institution, the prison where Mandela spent his last 14 months as a prisoner, prior to his 1990 release. There, we saw the statue of Mandela shown here.  

Rishi with the Mandela statue at Drakenstein. 

Shown here are two of the inscriptions on the base of the  statue. Note that one mentions the struggle for a "non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and free South Africa." I'm impressed. I've never seen any statue of a major U.S. leader that mentions the goal of a non-sexist society.

Cape Town and Environs Part 3 - Ancient Rock Art in South Africa

A story about Indonesian cave paintings that aired recently on NPR (http://www.npr.org/2014/10/08/354166930/indonesian-cave-paintings-as-old-as-europes-ancient-art) prompted me to write this blog post on rock art at Sevilla, near Clanwilliam, which Rishi and I saw while on our Cape Town, South Africa trip. We viewed the artwork shown below during an afternoon spent walking along a trail that accesses rock paintings created by San bushmen, the area’s original inhabitants.

In Indonesia, per the NPR story, new dating techniques that analyzed mineral deposits on top of the drawings put the age of the cave art at about 35,000 to 40,000 years old, comparable to the age of cave paintings in Western Europe. Although European cave paintings may be the best known and thus have led to the belief (the Euro-centric belief, I might add) that human artwork began there, archaeologists quoted by NPR asserted that cave painting likely originated in Africa and then spread around the world as those peoples left Africa. 

"When something like this shows up almost instantaneously, all over the distribution of humans, within say 10,000 years, the odds are it's something from our ancestors," says John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York.

In Africa, our species goes back 200,000 years, Shea notes. But archaeological sites there tend to be found in shallow caves that are relatively exposed to wind and the hot, humid conditions — unlike the deep, cold caves in Europe that are ideal for preserving artwork." 

The exact date of the Sevilla paintings is unknown, with estimates ranging widely from 800 years to 8,000 years old. But as the NPR story reports, dating rock art is difficult and Indonesian researchers previously thought the art there was less than 10,000 years old, so perhaps the drawings we saw are older as well. 

The paintings are not protected at all, allowing visitors to get right up to them. Fortunately, the fellow visitors we saw were all respectful and refrained from touching the ancient drawings. 

Nature’s artwork, in the form of flowers and spectacular rock formations, was also on display.

Foraging - Grocery Shopping in Gaborone

I owe thanks for this blog’s title to my friend Marion, who said I’d find shopping here a bit like foraging. Whenever the topic comes up in conversation, expats agree that there’s no one-stop-shopping. Locating a particular ingredient may require visiting three or four stores, and I’ve yet to spot some things anywhere, despite having checked out about 20 grocery outlets – and some of those multiple times -- in the four weeks since my arrival in Gaborone. I confess I've spent an inordinate amount of time browsing in grocery stores, but bear in mind that one side of my family was in the grocery business and the other in the beer and wine trade. I guess you could say that food snobbery comes naturally to me. My interrelated obsessions with food shopping, cooking, and dining are in my blood. Readers are forewarned: this blog will feature regular posts related to food.

The produce section of this store offers beautiful fresh greens.

Game City: this bland mall looks like
it could be in any town, any where.

Almost all shopping here involves a visit to a mall, either a strip mall or an enclosed mall. Near our apartment are one of each, the older Kgale View strip mall and the newer and much larger enclosed Game City, which between the two of them offer six grocery outlets. I’ve stopped at all six in search of a particular item and still come up empty. Rishi and I also frequently shop at Riverwalk, the mall closest to the University. On my exploratory forays around town, I’ve checked out several other malls plus Hyper, a warehouse store. And yes, there’s a small farmers’ market somewhere most weekends.

The grocery chains vary substantially in terms of merchandise carried and pricing, which of course is true everywhere. Most of them are based in South Africa, and that’s where most of the merchandise comes from as well. At the low end are Shoppers, Shop-Rite, and Checkers, about which I will say no more. Game, the South African subsidiary of WalMart, is not all that different from an older and smaller U.S. WalMart store, with limited food selections and the bulk of the store given to everything else ranging from housewares to furniture to sporting goods. Game is the cheapest or maybe the only place in Gaborone to find some kinds of merchandise, and thus I will be giving some of my shopping dollars to WalMart, albeit reluctantly. 

Does this picture give you a headache? The shopping experience
at Game is every bit as pleasant as a trip to WalMart in the US.  

Choppies, a Botswana-based chain, includes Indian ex-pats among its founders and management, so these groceries carry the largest selection of Indian and other Asian groceries. Moving up the scale, next are Spar and Pick-n-Pay. 

Specialty items on display at Woolworths.

Woolworths stores are at the top of the heap. Most Woolworths locations are small department stores that also contain a grocery and wine section, but some are grocery only with a slightly wider selection. At Woolworths you can find a small selection of good produce, decent looking meats, gluten-free pasta, and gourmet items like goat cheese, french jams, and prosciutto. But the prices make Whole Foods look like a bargain. Health Alternatives stores are small health food stores, with most of their inventory consisting of vitamins and supplements, sort of like a GNC. They also carry packages of various grains and specialty flours, so that’s where I’ve purchased brown rice flour, millet, and several other items for gluten-free cooking.

Enough about these chains. Let's get to the overall shopping experience. How’s the quality and the prices? What can you get and what’s difficult to find? 

The cereal section at Spar, though large, contains 
limited choices: corn flakes, bran flakes,
muesli, oatios, and weetabix (shredded wheat).
Then again, the absence of Cap’n Crunch, Apple
Jacks, and Froot Loops is probably a good thing.

First off, I’ll say that some of the stores are very clean, others, not so much. Generally this correlates with the pricing level, so no big surprise there. Many are quite large, in terms of square footage, though none are the size of a huge U.S supermarket, and frozen food sections are much smaller. Regardless of size, variety is limited and in the larger stores, the aisles are typically just stocked with more and more boxes of the same items.   

In terms of prices, staples are really cheap, but for something unusual or imported from anywhere other than South Africa, sticker shock is the rule. If you need a plastic bag to tote away your purchases, you have to pay the equivalent of about 4 cents for it. If this is intended to encourage people to bring their own bags, it doesn’t appear to be working. Nearly everyone is buying the bags.

Below are some observations, aisle by aisle, based on merchandise categories.

Produce: Selections are much more limited than in the U.S, with organic items almost totally absent. So far, outside of the farmers market, the only organic produce I've come across was bananas at Woolworth's.

In most stores, the majority of the produce is
pre-packaged, often in Styrofoam trays. 

But what’s here is generally fresh and quite flavorful. For instance, since it’s winter here, the stores have delicious, very sweet butternut and hubbard squash, but nothing like the range of squashes available back home at a supermarket, let alone Munson Farms. The tomatoes are tastier than supermarket tomatoes in the U.S., though still nothing like a home grown one. Mushrooms are white and sometimes brown criminis. Not a shitake or oyster to be found, let alone something like a chanterelle. 

Greens are delicious, fresh, and cheap,
about 33 cents per bunch.

Bunches of greens – Swiss chard and mustard -- are in nearly every store, but no kale. Interestingly, they call Swiss chard spinach here, whereas what we refer to as spinach is termed European spinach, and is occasionally available, washed and bagged. 

For fruit, every store carries Satsuma mandarins, which they call naartjies, bananas, apples (both green and red), cantaloupe, papaya,and pineapples. Now and then I’ve seen grapes, kiwis, plums, peaches, mangoes and jack fruit. Strawberries, when available, are about $3 for a small box of about a dozen.





Basics like potatoes, onions, carrots, celery, and green cabbage are for sale everywhere and are really cheap. Potatoes, for instance, cost about $0.50 per pound. Carrots that are very good are about 90 cents/pound. But a bunch of cilantro, if it's in stock at all, varies between $1 and $2.50. 

This very sweet giant cabbage, for only $1.50,
was large enough for two big pots of cabbage
soup, plus several batches of coleslaw. 

Looking for head lettuce? Iceberg is it. Or, at the
nicer stores, bags of salad mix are quite fresh, but pricey.

... a welcome alternative to that
supermarket bagged salad.

Gorgeous organic produce at Saturday farmers market...

A large portion of the dairy case is naught
but processed cheese, most likely akin to
American singles, but I haven’t sampled any to
confirm that impression, nor do I intend to do so. 

Dairy: Milk is almost always full cream, which at home would be whole milk, with a half gallon costing about $2.25 to $2.75 depending where you buy it. Only Woolworth carries 2% and 1% milk, at a premium of course. Sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, and yogurt are available everywhere, but all of it, even the plain, contains stabilizers and preservatives. Cheese choices are painfully limited. So far I’ve purchased an acceptable cheddar, “gouda” that was a boring orange cheese, decent blue cheese, tolerable brie, mozzarella, and extremely salty feta. At Woolworth’s, I picked up real parmesan, cambezola, and a nice boerenkaas (a type of gouda) with caraway seeds.

Meats: Botswana’s number two industry is beef (second only to diamonds), making beef widely available and relatively cheap. Lean ground beef sells for about $3.25/lb. Chicken and pork are also on sale everywhere. Lamb chops are in most stores but other cuts are harder to find. Sausage is popular, but all of it contains fillers, usually wheat, so is off limits for us, plus they're loaded with preservatives and MSG. I’ve seen free-standing butcher shops around town, but haven’t yet checked them out.

Grains and beans: Maize (aka corn), sorghum, and rice are dietary staples of the Batswana (that’s the word for the people of Botswana), so get lots of shelf space in all the stores. Maize is available as samp, which is something like posole, and maize meal, all of it white. Besides white and brown rice, one can select from basmati, jasmine, and abrorio. Sorghum is sold as a meal that’s usually made into a porridge, but for us it’s one of the flours that can be used for gluten-free baking. Stores also carry a large assortment of dried beans and lentils.

That's a whole lot of rice and beans in a large Choppies store. 

Yahoo! Buckwheat groats and gluten-fee pasta.

Bread, biscuits, crackers. A loaf of bread is cheap, selling for about $1.25, though I haven't tried any because of Rishi's gluten-free diet. People here have quite the sweet tooth, so the variety of biscuits (cookies), crackers, and rusks (sort of like biscotti but bigger, usually eaten with coffee or tea) is quite wide.

All of the Indian spices are
available in the stores.

Condiments and spices: It’s clear that folks around here like spicy flavors too because the stores carry all kinds of spice mixtures for the brai (that’s the Afrikaans word for a grill), and a big selection of hot sauces. But that sweet tooth I mentioned above comes into play, because most of these sauces, and the salad dressings too, contain a hefty dose of sugar. I’ve found good olive oil and OK balsamic. I even spotted truffle oil at Woolworth’s. 

What’s unavailable or so expensive it’s ridiculous: I’ve yet to locate a few things that I could get in most any supermarket in the U.S. So here’s what I plan to look for during our upcoming trip to Cape Town, the foodie center of South Africa. And if I can’t get it there, it’s on my list for trips to Costco and Trader Joe’s when next in the states!

Lots of blue packages of Dairy Milk
milk chocolate bars, and oh yes,
some red-wrapped dark chocolate
bars hidden on the bottom shelf. 

• Tamari wheat-free soy sauce. Non-existent here, as far as I can tell.
• Pure vanilla extract. Every store stocks imitation vanilla “essence.”
• Chocolate chips. Well, I did see a small container of chips loaded with chemical junk. For chocolate chip cookies, I resorted to buying dark chocolate bars and chopping them up. Even dark chocolate is hard to come by here, with mostly milk chocolate on offer – remember that sweet tooth.
• Quinoa: It sells for the painfully high price of about $20 per pound and I decided to pass. We’ll eat rice and corn instead.
• Nuts: Almonds, cashews, and walnuts are only available in small packets, and the prices are way high. It’s sort of like succumbing to an overpriced packet of nuts when you’re at the airport and desperate for something relatively healthy to snack on. For example, that 200g packet of cashews costs the equivalent of about $14/lb. Pine nuts? What’s that?

I'd have to be nuts, or maybe just a bit flaky,
to shell out the equivalent of $16/lb for sliced almonds.