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From rappelling to sea kayaking, Cape crusaders seek adventure
12-14-2003TABLE MOUNTAIN, CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- This was not a place I ever expected myself to be, nor was it something I ever saw myself doing.
If you go: Cape Town
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SOUTH AFRICAN TOURISM BOARD: 1-800-822-5368;
Standing with my back to a sheer, 400-foot cliff overlooking the South Atlantic, I took a step backward over the edge. Then, despite a lifelong phobia about these kinds of heights, I took another. The morning sun was blazing, but that didn't explain the sweat pouring off me. It was good that I was wearing gloves.
Trying not to grip the belay rope too tightly, I frog-hopped backward down the sandstone wall for maybe 100 feet into the cool shadow. Just as I began to trust in the rope and strap harness around my legs, just as I was beginning to think this rappelling wasn't so tough, the stone face curved up under a 10-foot ledge. Suddenly, I was dangling on that trust with nothing but 300 feet of atmosphere separating me from the landing place far below.
"Why didn't anyone mention anything about this?" I thought.
Actually, I had spent much of the previous day much higher over the South Atlantic, on a South African Airways jetliner headed to Cape Town. Along with two other writers, Tim Neville and Nathan Borchelt, both of Outside Magazine, South Africa's national tourism agency had invited me to sample its adventure travel opportunities.
I was expecting the entire trip to be an adventure, and not only because it was my first visit to South Africa. I enjoy bicycling and riding horses, but other activities on the itinerary would be new to me, such as sea kayaking and something called abseiling.
But my first surprise was Cape Town itself.
I had considered myself reasonably familiar with the region's geography and history.
I knew, for example, that Portuguese navigators had been the first Europeans to round this corner of Africa in the 15th century on the way to their Indian Ocean explorations. A century later, the English navigator Sir Frances Drake sailed around the world. In 1580, as his ship cornered continental Africa's southwestern tip, he commented on the spit of low mountains looming claw-like over the ocean. "This Cape is a most stately thing," Drake wrote in the ship's log. "The fairest we saw in our whole circumference of the earth."
Seventy years after that, sailors from the Dutch East India Company waded ashore in a natural harbor about 30 miles northwest of that rocky headland, which by then was known as the Cape of Good Hope. The settlement they founded became Cape Town and, eventually, capital of Dutch and then British South Africa.
Although the capital of the country moved northwest to Pretoria in 1860, Cape Town remained a primary center of commerce and culture, and arguably Africa's most cosmopolitan city, a spicy melange of mixed ethnicities of African, European, Arab, Indian and Asian descents.
Cape Town has played a central role in more modern South African history. Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island in Cape Town's Table Bay. Desmond Tutu's bully pulpit was here. Now, as South Africa prepares to celebrate a decade of democracy following its long night of apartheid, Cape Town has become a trendy, comparatively inexpensive world destination with a reputation for energy and excitement.
In addition to poignant historical sites, quality museums, superior hotels, pan-ethnic restaurants and a vibrant cultural scene, Cape Town boasts a reputation as Africa's most cosmopolitan city, albeit one tinged by the problematic realities of a huge impoverished population. Because of its many Muslim residents, it is perceived as at risk for terrorism.
Certainly, its dramatic setting, between the ocean and Table Mountain, the flat-topped peak that rises more than 3,500 feet behind it, ranks Cape Town among the world's most magnificent metropolitan places. It also boasts fine sandy beaches, precipitously rocky coastlines, lush, well-tended gardens and arid mountain wilderness.
I understood all that before I arrived. But my expectations were no match for the city where we had landed the previous night.
Back on that lofty perch on Table Mountain, I beheld the jagged, treeless slope sliding away below me all the way down to the fringe of Camp's Bay and its resort village of Llandudno. My view to the north and west was blocked by the mountain, but to the south and east, the range of 16 cloud-fringed peaks curiously known as the Twelve Apostles dwindled in the hazy distance to the Cape of Good Hope. The remaining 150 degrees of horizon was a curving arc of open ocean that stretched as far as I could see.
Then I saw a pair of paragliders soaring off the Lion's Head peak far below me and realized I was very glad to be alive and at that time and place.
It had been after 10 when we arrived the previous evening, the conclusion of my 26-hour journey from Pittsburgh that, with crossing time zones, measured 33 hours on the clock. It was also something of a contra-seasonal shock, since March was late winter in Pennsylvania and early fall in Africa. After so many hours of airplane air, the warm wind that whipped through the van's open windows seemed to me sublime.
We had been met by Jeanine Whewell, a representative from a local tour outfitter, Adventure Village, and Wayne Donaldson, an independent fishing guide who had been assigned to taxi us around to sample as many Cape Town adventures as could be packed into a three-day visit. Wayne kept us moving, but we barely scratched the surface.
Previously, when thinking about African adventures, I had pictured various safaris touring vast nature preserves or tracking mountain gorillas in the mist. The Adventure Village brochure gave me a new appreciation of the range of possibilities.
In addition to stand-bys such as surfing and rock-climbing, their menu included bungee jumping, sand boarding, jet biking, shark diving and something called kamikaze kanyon. Abseiling, it turned out, was simply what South Africans called rappelling.
What had I gotten myself into? I began to suspect that instead of having worried about malarial protection, I should have concerned myself with the possibility of adrenaline overdose. My room on the 29th floor of the Holiday Inn was comfortable, but it took me a while to fall asleep.
Although no adventures were scheduled for the morning, I was up early enough to admire the sun rising over the fog blanket that enveloped Cape Town. I was also pleased to find that I was feeling in synch with the day, rather than the jet-lagged corpse I feared I'd be. It occurred to me that although the flight had been many hours, much of that had been north-south. Thus, the time zone shift was no larger than going to Europe, and I had more chance to sleep on the plane.
After a quick breakfast, I walked around the downtown area, including a turn through the Company Gardens, the lovely green space built where Cape Town's early settlers had situated their fields, and I stopped in the nearby cathedral over which Archbishop Tutu had long presided.
Throngs of office workers, shoppers, street people, school kids and tourists filled the neat, weekday morning sidewalks of the high-rise central area. Though Cape Town's cast was decidedly African, its ambiance was reminiscent of San Francisco or Vancouver. On the way back to the hotel, I stopped into Woolworth's and bought a canvas bush hat to protect myself from the sun.
It turned out to be a smart move. The next three days went by in a blaze of sunshine and whirl of activity, as Wayne hustled us from place to splendid place.
The open sea that first afternoon was choppy for an inexperienced kayaker like me, but we pulled our way through the standing waves to Duiker Island, the seal-covered rock maybe a mile out of Hout Bay, a few miles south of Cape Town. Although the setting was stupendous, the pinnacle massif known as the Sentinel side-lit by the setting sun, I was relieved to make it back to the sheltered beach before my arms gave out entirely.
We were at it again early the next morning, the first item on the agenda being the climb to the top of Table Mountain. Fortunately for my aching arms, that involved nothing more strenuous than a drive to the Aerial Cableway station.
The crowd waiting in line to board could afford the adult fare, about $5 each way: local day hikers planning to make their way down one of the hundreds of steep routes to the bottom, families up for a picnic on the top, tourists from the cruise ships coming up for a quick peak peek, the high-heeled ladies from Latin America just along for the ride.
Certainly, the dangling gondola, whose floor revolves once during the five minute journey, offers views that dwarf anything Mount Washington has to offer.
If the broad panorama from the table's top was overwhelming, I found that hanging from its side was quiet and cool.
Rather than being paralyzed by the heights, I calmly lowered myself through space, taking pleasure observing the Protea plant rooted in a rocky crevasse, aware of the oceanic vista over my shoulder, even heeding the guy far below guiding me to the end of the rope. What I most remember is that my few minutes in space passed all too quickly. As we hiked back to the table's top, we all shared a similar feeling.
Descending Table Mountain turned out to be more of a challenge.
We were met at the lower cable station with a rack of mountain bikes for a guided tour of the trails along the mountain's lower flanks. Although the going was mostly down from there, much of the route was on rutted, fire-access roads slashed through the scrubby brush land, places where one wrong twist of the handlebars could spell disaster. Fortunately, all made it to the bottom more or less unscathed. Tim and Nate later confirmed that the area offered much better routes to ride.
Other less strenuous items on our agenda over the next days included a morning horseback ride along a fogbound beach and a sundown cruise to the far shore of Table Bay. That afternoon, we drove two hours south to the Cape Point, a wild, fynbos-covered promontory that is Africa's southwestern corner.
Although the continent's southernmost point, the place where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet, actually lies a hundred miles to the southeast at Cape Agulhas, this is a Cape beyond compare. Its two rocky fingers silently beckon to the southern seas, points mariners could see for miles. I could have spent the whole day hiking its rocky headland and trudging up its mile-long but virtually deserted dunes.
Of course, the harbor-side cafe in the naval port of Simonstown on the edge of the vast False Bay was also a very pleasant place to spend a sunny hour.
That's the way it went. Everywhere we left wishing we'd had more time to spend. On our final morning in Cape Town, we rose for the three-hour drive south and east along the coast to an eco-resort called Grootbos. An afternoon and morning under its elegant wilderness only whetted our appetites for more of those adventures.
But too early we were whisked away to the wine-making vale of Stellenbosch, which resembles a hybrid between the valleys of Rhine and Napa, except of course for the Cheetah preserve and Raptor re-habitation center.
All in all, this part of the country struck me as being little like the wild Africa I had imagined and more like a splendid seaside retreat, a sort of Cape Cod or coastal Carolina that offers a wide range of high-energy adventures and urban pleasures.
For example, I also enjoyed several excellent meals, including one in a unique establishment called Kennedy's Cigar Bar, named the story goes, after John F. Kennedy, who supposedly instructed Pierre Salinger to buy as many H. Upmans as possible the night before he signed the Cuban embargo.
That weekend, Cape Town happened to be hosting a jazz festival and several dozen unrelated events. The freebie entertainment guide was a finger thick. Clearly it is a very happening place, one of beauties and contrasts.
There's the glittery bustle of the recently renovated Victoria and Albert Waterfront, with its trendy restaurants, sleek shops and buzzing entertainment venues. It is very like similar successful pier-side redevelopments in Baltimore and Chicago.
That contrasted with the sprawling townships of tightly packed shanty huts that flank both sides of the airport highway for miles.
No matter your particular pleasure, the Cape Town area can provide plenty of the kind of new and unexpected perspectives that support a more lengthy stay.
I hope someday to get the chance.
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