Weekend II: rain-outs and World Cup construction delays

Yesterday we were greeted with the worst possible weather in which to scale a mountain: rainy, cold, and thunderstorms in the distance. So while we saw the bottom half of Table Mountain from various vantage points, we limited our exploring to the city proper. Camilla (another visiting student) found a tour guide through the NGO we’re working with, and he drove us in and showed us around the remains of District Six and its museum.

District Six was an integrated, working class neighborhood in Cape Town that was declared “whites only” by the apartheid government in 1966. The neighborhood was demolished, and the black and coloured residents were sent to live in the Cape Flats, 40 km away. The townships out in the Flats are filled with shanties and lean-tos, and the area is rife with gangsterism. The museum commemorates the neighborhood with interviews, artifacts, and artworks from the citizens. It was quite a moving experience.

Today the idea was to find the Green Point Market, but it has been displaced by the construction for the World Cup 2010 – starting in less than one year, as I hear several times a day. It took us about an hour of walking to find it, at which point we were too tired to walk around , so we caught a minibus back into the city and had lunch. Our guide picked us up and drove us down to Chapman’s Peak, just south of the city. There's not much to say about it, but the view was lovely:

C. and Leon walking around Chapman's Point. The Sentinel, the peak seen in the distance, is privately owned and up for auction. You can't develop it, and the owners expect to get about R12 500 000 (~$1.5m). Any takers?