My Travel Book - The Western Cape (South Africa) - Simon's Town and Penguins on Boulders Beach

There is an easy way to go from Cape Town and from Muizenberg to Simon’s Town. You can get there by train. Using the Southern Rail Line Route, you’ll travel along the coast which is very beautiful. Of course, reading the safety instructions on the train website will probably put a lot of tourists off. Just remember that these instructions apply to any place in South Africa. Be careful and your travel will be very enjoyable.

We chose to go by car since the trains don’t run to Cape Point, the terminus being Simon’s Town. We wanted to drive through Simon’s Town on our way to Boulders Beach and from there, to the Cape of Good Hope.

One or two words about Simon’s Town. As usual, it was named after a former Dutch governor, Simon van der Stel who arrived in the colony in 1679 and decided that False Bay would be a much safer alternative to the Cape Bay during winter. Its Afrikaans name is Simonstadt. For the past two centuries, it has been an important naval base, first for the Royal Navy and then for the South African Navy as early as 1922.

The Victorian buildings in Simon’s Town have been very well preserved, at least along St George’s Street and quite amazing.

There is a “Historical Mile” just like in Muizenberg but we were in a hurry and we were famished. We stopped at the Seaforth Restaurant mainly because it has a very convenient outside deck which overhangs the sea and offers a beautiful view of the False Bay mountains. And… the icing on the cake… there they were, my first penguins... Just don't forget to turn onto "Gay Road".

Facing the restaurant, there is this huge building which is the South African Institute for Maritime Technology. Read institute for defense research “to satisfy South African MoD strategic needs for techno-military support, products and services and to establish applicable technology and systems to further the interest of the SANDF.” A very serious place to work indeed but since you are in South Africa, lunch break turns into beach time which can be a real perk, I think. Quite a few people there do not hesitate to don swimming suits and plunge into the water while others take a walk along the beach. Nice, isn’t it!

I couldn’t wait to get to Boulders Beach which is a very beautiful place. Guess why it is called "Boulders Beach"!

The reason why I couldn't wait... Because this is the place where one couple of African penguins decided to settle down some time in 1983. The area was already highly inhabited by humans but the penguins took up residence there anyway and the colony expanded. Now they are very protected and to watch them you need to follow a wooden walkway. But first you have to pay an entrance fee (60 rands. About 4 dollars or euros). 

There are rangers all over the place in order to insure the birds’ security . And the tourists’ safety also, by the way. Penguins are known to nip intruders and they have razor-sharp beaks. And this can be a disagreeable experience, I have been told.

African penguins are an endangered species. There were millions of them when the Dutch settled in the Cape area in 1652, and still millions of them in the 1930s. Less than a century later,  there are only about 1.200 mating pairs left. Why? Well, you know, always the same problems more or less. Pollution and oil spills. Dwindling fishing ressources due to climate change and industrial fishing. Nesting in a rather unsafe environment even if they are protected from the tourists, they are not protected from mongoose, genets nor cats and dogs and kelp gulls too, of course.
 
Those penguins are rather small and far less good-looking than their Antartic counterparts, the Emperor Penguins. Probably because they do not belong to the same species. The Emperor Penguins are Spheniscidae (and are called “Manchots” in French) while the African Penguins are Alcidae. They used to be nicknamed “Jackass” penguins because they are rather noisy and kind of bray, a lot like donkeys even when they are young, believe me.

Of course, they are fun to watch. They waddle along but as soon as they hit the water edge, they turn into sea missiles, sort of. They can swim as fast as 7 kms/hour. They usually go fishing way off from their colony and therefore they are very vulnerable to predators like sharks, Cape fur seals and sometimes killer whales.

In October when we were in Boulders, it was moulting season which is not really the best time to watch them. Someone said that they look sad and depressed… How would you feel if you were to loose your feathers and worse if you were fasting for two months? Because this is what moulting is all about,  starvation. Penguins do not swim out to the open sea to feed while they are moulting.

It was hard to leave Boulders which is a magnificent place and the penguins. But remember, we were on our way to a place I had dreamed about for a long, long time… The Cape of Good Hope. And we were running late…












*Good Luck, and Good Night*

"This Morning..."

This morning, the sun is shining over Paris. Blue skies. Spring-like weather. It feels definitely strange, abnormal even. It should be dark and raining, shouldn’t it? Because our hearts are heavy and in despair. Because we are all grieving, seriously grieving.

Popeye and I had planned to spend this week-end in Paris staying at Swee’Pea’s apartment since Niruj, our friend from India (and Swee’Pea’s)  would be in Paris. I had missed him so much for several years that I was really looking forward to meeting him again.

On Friday night, Popeye and I decided not to go out for dinner and stay home instead. We were expecting a message from Swee’Pea who was on his way to Montreal. We were peacefully reading on the couch.

My phone rang around 10:30 p.m. SP from Boston airport. Which was very strange and could only spell trouble. We mainly communicate through WhatsApp messages and Skype if we need to talk.

“Mom,” he said. “I am at the airport waiting for my plane. I am watching CNN right now. Horrible things are happening in Paris right in the Oberkampf area.”

We don’t watch tv and the district where we were staying is quite far away from the 10th and the 11th districts where hell was breaking loose, unknown to us. We were in a very quiet area. We only started hearing the sirens of the ambulances that were bringing a lot of casualties from the Bataclan to the nearby hospital around 1 a.m. And by then we knew a lot about what had happened even though we did not fully grasp the extent of the devastation we would awaken to.

While I was talking with my son who was really worried about his friends in Paris (some of them live right where the attacks were happening), I started getting messages from Niruj. “saw the news? attacks in Paris… am seeing the news in a bar .. sounds really grave”

We turned the radio on. The newsmen were so confused that it was very hard to understand what was going on. There were talks about shootings and explosions and the President being ‘exfiltrated’ from the Stade de France where he was attending a football game. They then started having those “man on the street” interviews. “Well, no, I did not see anything. I heard firecrackers and my neighbour said…” You know, those highly emotional and mainly false accounts they are keen to use to stay on the air just in case…

So we turned the radio off and turned our computers on, browsing hopefully reliable newspapers websites.

What we were reading was terrible. And the accounts were still quite incomplete of course. But it sounded so horrible. Last January, when terror hit Paris twice, almost all of us in France became “Charlie” and we did believe this would never happen again. Not in Paris.

Of course it had happened again and again in Irak and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Syria of course but it all seemed so far away and in such unstable places that French people kept feeling safe in Paris because it is so easy to live blindfolded. 

But we did keep busy arguing about refugees who were fleeing from the very dark forces that would attack and try to destroy our very complacent quietude a few days/weeks/months later. Because it was so much easier for so many people in Europe to turn against innocent victims than to think that one day, monsters were amongst us, as European as we are, born in Europe and raised and schooled in Europe. European citizens.

Early last night, someone tweeted that it only took a few hours of mayhem in Paris to get us to start understanding why thousands of refugees were willing to jump aboard an inflatable dinghy and risk their lives to live safely.
 
I am not even sure that this is going to happen. A story was already going around as early as Saturday morning. A kamikaze had supposedly lost his passport which had supposedly been issued to one of the refugees in Greece. This may be true or untrue. They tend to think right now that the passport was stolen. Anyway, who is going to remember what Gandhi said about the dirty drop in the ocean?

“You must not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

But in France, voices are already being heard asking for refugees to be sent back to Syria or elsewhere. Right at the moment when we should feel a lot of empathy because suddenly we feel pain and hurt and it is ghastly. You know, feeling insecure and in peril.

Yesterday, Paris was totally empty. Vacant. Everything was closed. The news were still quite imprecise. State of emergency had been solemly declared. Fear and ache were so tangible and yet it was still so unreal. You hear that Paris is under heavy fire and that there are a few casualties and during the night (nobody slept much last night), you learn that there are at least 129 dead plus more than 300 wounded persons, 99 of them between life and death, all of them because they had been shot.

I know that numbers do not mean much when read out of context. I read a post today written by a famous American travel agent who was trying to convince his countrymen that it would be safe to travel to Europe anyway since in the States, some 30.000 people die every year (just about 100 persons by day) because of gun violence. (I am brief there…)

The very high death toll on French roads cannot be compared to what happened on Friday night. My brother died in a car accident with a very, very high alcohol  level in the blood. People whose family members and friends died last night while they were peacefully dining out or listening to a concert won’t most certainly mourn them the way I grieved.

Because whenever I travel by car, I hope that I won’t meet with some drunk driver who felt perfectly fine to take the wheel like my brother did. Even though he was the only casualty.

We are talking about accidental deaths which should be treated like manslaughter. In the States, there are a lot of first-degree and second-degree murders because of guns.

On Friday night in Paris, it was terrorism at work. Ugly and deadly terrorism. People shot at random, not even because of religious bigotry (Muslims killing non-believers. Because a few faithful Muslims were also killed at random that night). People shot at random because this kind of shooting is aimed at creating terror, hence the terms used to define the killers: they were first and foremost terrorists.

I still remember Paris in 1982 and 1983 and 1986 and 1995. Sometimes up to 6 terrorist bombings in one month. This was truly terrifying. We all kept on living rather normally because first there was no other choice for Parisians and second there was only one way to fight terrorism: we refused consciously and maybe sometimes unconsciously to show that we were afraid. At least we tried to. We were probably showing off mostly but it was very effective.

The hardest thing was hearing on the radio that a bomb had exploded somewhere you knew that one of your friends might have been during the day. There were no social networks then. We did not have cell phones either. I remember calling my friends: “Oh, great. You’re home. You allright? Your family?” And then life started anew again until the next bombing.

Last night Facebook was overflowing with messages. Lots were filled with pain and sorrow.

We have been warned that there may be replicas. Brussels too is under siege now since a few terrorists lived there before going on the rampage in Paris. The Belgian police has made quite a few arrests today and we know that there are nests of potentially dangerous fundamentalists in Brussels. This is where we’ll be heading tomorrow morning. Then we’ll be back to Paris because Popeye has meetings there and I need to go to the hospital. And then back to Brussels by train and back to Paris again, etc. Life must go on.

We have to keep living normally, at least the Parisians who came out of this terror rather unharmed. I mean, those who haven’t lost friends or family members. Those who haven’t been hurt. Those who haven’t lived through those horrible moments when their life was plunged into chaos and terror just because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (except that it was totally the right place and the right time until the terrorists arrived).

We have to keep on living normally on their behalf. Yesterday, we went to the restaurant with our friend as planned. We were "happy" because it was full of people. Parisians were indeed showing they were not afraid.

Well, maybe a little bit though. Cafés were totally empty outside but chairs and tables had been put up there as usual.   

Anyway, don’t we keep flying all over the world when terrorists keep blowing planes up?

All my life I’ve been impressed by the Londoners’ tremendous courage during the “Blitz” (the Battle of Britain). The way they kept on working and living and loving while their homes were bombed at random and their neighbours, friends and loved ones were buried beneath the ruins.

Were Churchill still alive, he’d say again: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

This Morning...

This morning, the sun is shining over Paris. Blue skies. Spring-like weather. It feels definitely strange, abnormal even. It should be dark and raining, shouldn’t it? Because our hearts are heavy and in despair. Because we are all grieving, seriously grieving.

Popeye and I had planned to spend this week-end in Paris staying at Swee’Pea’s apartment since Niruj, our friend from India (and Swee’Pea’s)  would be in Paris. I had missed him so much for several years that I was really looking forward to meeting him again.

On Friday night, Popeye and I decided not to go out for dinner and stay home instead. We were expecting a message from Swee’Pea who was on his way to Montreal. We were peacefully reading on the couch.

My phone rang around 10:30 p.m. SP from Boston airport. Which was very strange and could only spell trouble. We mainly communicate through WhatsApp messages and Skype if we need to talk.

“Mom,” he said. “I am at the airport waiting for my plane. I am watching CNN right now. Horrible things are happening in Paris right in the Oberkampf area.”

We don’t watch tv and the district where we were staying is quite far away from the 10th and the 11th districts where hell was breaking loose, unknown to us. We were in a very quiet area. We only started hearing the sirens of the ambulances that were bringing a lot of casualties from the Bataclan to the nearby hospital around 1 a.m. And by then we knew a lot about what had happened even though we did not fully grasp the extent of the devastation we would awaken to.

While I was talking with my son who was really worried about his friends in Paris (some of them live right where the attacks were happening), I started getting messages from Niruj. “saw the news? attacks in Paris… am seeing the news in a bar .. sounds really grave”

We turned the radio on. The newsmen were so confused that it was very hard to understand what was going on. There were talks about shootings and explosions and the President being ‘exfiltrated’ from the Stade de France where he was attending a football game. They then started having those “man on the street” interviews. “Well, no, I did not see anything. I heard firecrackers and my neighbour said…” You know, those highly emotional and mainly false accounts they are keen to use to stay on the air just in case…

So we turned the radio off and turned our computers on, browsing hopefully reliable newspapers websites.

What we were reading was terrible. And the accounts were still quite incomplete of course. But it sounded so horrible. Last January, when terror hit Paris twice, almost all of us in France became “Charlie” and we did believe this would never happen again. Not in Paris.

Of course it had happened again and again in Irak and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Syria of course but it all seemed so far away and in such unstable places that French people kept feeling safe in Paris because it is so easy to live blindfolded. 

But we did keep busy arguing about refugees who were fleeing from the very dark forces that would attack and try to destroy our very complacent quietude a few days/weeks/months later. Because it was so much easier for so many people in Europe to turn against innocent victims than to think that one day, monsters were amongst us, as European as we are, born in Europe and raised and schooled in Europe. European citizens.

Early last night, someone tweeted that it only took a few hours of mayhem in Paris to get us to start understanding why thousands of refugees were willing to jump aboard an inflatable dinghy and risk their lives to live safely.
I am not even sure that this is going to happen. A story was already going around as early as Saturday morning. A kamikaze had supposedly lost his passport which had supposedly been issued to one of the refugees in Greece. This may be true or untrue. They tend to think right now that the passport was stolen. Anyway, who is going to remember what Gandhi said about the dirty drop in the ocean?

“You must not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

But in France, voices are already being heard asking for refugees to be sent back to Syria or elsewhere. Right at the moment when we should feel a lot of empathy because suddenly we feel pain and hurt and it is ghastly. You know, feeling insecure and in peril.

Yesterday, Paris was totally empty. Vacant. Everything was closed. The news were still quite imprecise. State of emergency had been solemly declared. Fear and ache were so tangible and yet it was still so unreal. You hear that Paris is under heavy fire and that there are a few casualties and during the night (nobody slept much last night), you learn that there are at least 129 dead plus more than 300 wounded persons, 99 of them between life and death, all of them because they had been shot.

I know that numbers do not mean much when read out of context. I read a post today written by a famous American travel agent who was trying to convince his countrymen that it would be safe to travel to Europe anyway since in the States, some 30.000 people die every year (just about 100 persons by day) because of gun violence. (I am brief there…)

The very high death toll on French roads cannot be compared to what happened on Friday night. My brother died in a car accident with a very, very high alcohol  level in the blood. People whose family members and friends died last night while they were peacefully dining out or listening to a concert won’t most certainly mourn them the way I grieved.

Because whenever I travel by car, I hope that I won’t meet with some drunk driver who felt perfectly fine to take the wheel like my brother did. Even though he was the only casualty.

We are talking about accidental deaths which should be treated like manslaughter. In the States, there are a lot of first-degree and second-degree murders because of guns.

On Friday night in Paris, it was terrorism at work. Ugly and deadly terrorism. People shot at random, not even because of religious bigotry (Muslims killing non-believers. Because a few faithful Muslims were also killed at random that night). People shot at random because this kind of shooting is aimed at creating terror, hence the terms used to define the killers: they were first and foremost terrorists.

I still remember Paris in 1982 and 1983 and 1986 and 1995. Sometimes up to 6 terrorist bombings in one month. This was truly terrifying. We all kept on living rather normally because first there was no other choice for Parisians and second there was only one way to fight terrorism: we refused consciously and maybe sometimes unconsciously to show that we were afraid. At least we tried to. We were probably showing off mostly but it was very effective.

The hardest thing was hearing on the radio that a bomb had exploded somewhere you knew that one of your friends might have been during the day. There were no social networks then. We did not have cell phones either. I remember calling my friends: “Oh, great. You’re home. You allright? Your family?” And then life started anew again until the next bombing.

Last night Facebook was overflowing with messages. Lots were filled with pain and sorrow.

We have been warned that there may be replicas. Brussels too is under siege now since a few terrorists lived there before going on the rampage in Paris. The Belgian police has made quite a few arrests today and we know that there are nests of potentially dangerous fundamentalists in Brussels. This is where we’ll be heading tomorrow morning. Then we’ll be back to Paris because Popeye has meetings there and I need to go to the hospital. And then back to Brussels by train and back to Paris again, etc. Life must go on.

We have to keep living normally, at least the Parisians who came out of this terror rather unharmed. I mean, those who haven’t lost friends or family members. Those who haven’t been hurt. Those who haven’t lived through those horrible moments when their life was plunged into chaos and terror just because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (except that it was totally the right place and the right time until the terrorists arrived).

We have to keep on living normally on their behalf. Yesterday, we went to the restaurant with our friend as planned. We were "happy" because it was full of people. Parisians were indeed showing they were not afraid.

Well, maybe a little bit though. Cafés were totally empty outside but chairs and tables had been put up there as usual.   

Anyway, don’t we keep flying all over the world when terrorists keep blowing planes up?

All my life I’ve been impressed by the Londoners’ tremendous courage during the “Blitz” (the Battle of Britain). The way they kept on working and living and loving while their homes were bombed at random and their neighbours, friends and loved ones were buried beneath the ruins.

Were Churchill still alive, he’d say again: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

 


*Good Luck, and Good Night*

My Travel Book - The Western Cape (South Africa) - Fire? Let's Go Surfing in Muizenberg!

Our third morning in Cape Town.

We had spent the day before mainly assessing the condition of Swee’Pea’s appartment at Sea Point. Not really fit to live in yet. We had aired it and brought sheets and stuff to the cleaners. Not that they were dirty. A bit smelly and damp as could be expected after such a long absence and a vacant appartment by the seaside, all winter long. (Remember? Cape Town is in the southern hemisphere.)

As I got up to draw the drapes, I was feeling very excited since this was the morning we had chosen to go to Cape Point. We had spent a long time planning the day. We were to start having breakfast at a place called Hout Bay. I had been dreaming about this small café by the beach ever since Swee’Pea had sent us a picture of him and his friend Sebastian looking very happy facing a huge breakfast spread out on a white wooden table and looking at an incredibly beautiful bay.

It was quite early. What was this brownish cloud right in front of my eyes? Getting stronger by the minute. I am a Southerner and I am used to fires. I also knew that fires are quite common in South Africa, especially around Cape Town. The only puzzling thing was the lack of reddish glow, sure sign of flames.

I called Swee’Pea. “Fire,” I said. I imagine this woke him up quite swiftly. And then : “Not at all. Mom, this is fog coming up from the sea.”

“Fog?”

“Yup. Change of plans. We get breakfast at the hotel because we’ll have to go to Cape Point using the other road, across to False Bay, the one we were supposed to travel on on our way back to Cape Town. Sorry. No breakfast at Hout Bay.”

Breakfast at Hout Bay was to become a family joke. Because we tried three times to get breakfast there… Oh well!

Actually, this is  one of the reasons why I like the Western Cape so much. Not missing having breakfast in Hout Bay but because just like in Brittany, you have to adapt to atmospheric conditions without hesitating and enjoy your day to the fullest no matter what.

We had (some great) breakfast at the hotel and we left.

The fog was extremely dense for a while but it would probably clear out in the afternoon. And we drove towards False Bay. First stop: Muizenberg on our way to Cape Point.


I love South African names. Most of them are puzzling mainly because I do not speak Dutch (Afrikaans?). A lot are British though and this summer in England and Wales, we went through a lot of places which sounded very familiar… Sounded familiar but did not look familiar at all!

False Bay is a strange name for a beautiful and huge bay, isn’t it. Those were times without Google Maps nor GPS system. No kidding. Who would nowadays mistake Cape Point for Cape Hangklip (“Hang-ing Rock” in Dutch)? Cape Hangklip being called Cabo Falso in Portuguese and False Cape in English… So easy then to call the bay in-between “False Bay” i.e. not being Table Bay which the sailors were trying to reach rather desperately sometimes!

As soon as we moved away from the seaside, the fog disappeared. Blue and sunny skies. Amazing. Great landscapes.

We did arrive on the other side of the Cape, by the sea. False Bay and Muizenberg (spelled mew-zin-burg). (From Sergeant Muys ("mouse") who was one of the earliest postholders. Hence the name Muys Zijn Bergh - Muys' mountain.)

I had heard so much about Muizenberg from Swee’Pea. We’d call him on a Sunday morning and he’d say: “Sorry. I’m leaving in two minutes. I’m going to Muizenberg. Surfing with some friends. I'll call you when I get back. Bye!”

I only learnt about the Great Whites much later. I can’t remember how. Swee’Pea probably mentioned one day that there were watchers at Muizenberg so it was really safe to go surfing there.

“Watchers? What for?” (In metropolitan France, you get watchers on the beaches to check on the swimmers.)
“Shark watchers, Mom, for… white sharks.”

Great! Well he surfed there a lot with a lot of friends… and he’s still alive. So are his friends who still keep on surfing in Muizenberg.

I was eager to go to Muizenberg. I am not too much into surfing but I wanted to see the beach, 20 kms long (more than twice as long as our beach in Brittany) and probably much more beautiful because of the mountains and steep cliffs that surround it.

I loved the stunning beach. White sands. Beautiful waves. Interesting brightly colored beach huts that reminded me so much of the Netherlands, except that they looked a little bit more battered… Sorry.

But when we got there, there was a flag waving in the wind. 

A black flag with a white shark outline. “Well,” said Swee’Pea. “Murky waters. This means that they won’t see the sharks coming.”

“But…” There were surfers everywhere. People swimming. “Did you go surfing whenever there was a…?” Sometimes I am such a fool. Surfing is a lot about adrenalin. So imagine with sharks probably lurking about! 

“Well, I’ve never seen a green flag here. Never ever.”

I did not even ask whether they went surfing anyway when the red flag was on.

Muizenberg looks quite run-down though and a perfect home for surfers!

Nowadays it is hard to imagine the once very elegant beach surroundings when Agatha Christie came to surf there in the 1920s. Yes. Agatha Christie used to surf in Muizenberg. I wonder if in those times, there were watchers and sirens wailing whenever a shark was spotted. But let’s not forget that Muizenberg is supposedly the birthplace of surfing in South Africa. A Mecca for surfers.

I missed a lot in Muizenberg though. We were in a hurry. Precious time lost because of the fog. So I did not get to walk along what is called the Historical Mile with the Posthuys (1673), the Casa Labia (1930) and Rhodes’ Cottage Museum. “We’ll be back,” said Swee’Pea.

But since my son is an astronomer well-versed in scientific outreach, I did not miss the AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) which is a very important African center for education and research in mathematical sciences.

We left Muizenberg with no regrets even though Swee’Pea had mixed feelings about not being able to go surfing, I’m sure…

Our next stop was to be Simon’s Town, home to the South African Navy and African penguins.

Guess what I was awaiting with keen anticipation…










*Good Luck, and Good Night*