Day 57 - Cape Town

 Today started with a series of very rude awakenings.  In each country, immigration officials board the ship when we dock and check over all of our passports (and yellow fever cards, if necessary) before we are allowed to debark.  Unlike in other ports, South African officials require that they meet us face-to-face when they check over our passports.  This meant we were all called up by Sea (the halls are divided into Seas; I live in the Aegean Sea) to retrieve our passports, present them to the officials, and turn them back in.  Just my luck, the Aegean Sea was the first to be called up at 6:50 am.  I got out of bed, put on pants, and took the elevator (yes, don’t judge me) up to the 7^th floor.  By 7 am the line was so long that we took the stairs down to the 6^th floor to join the queue.  I got my passport and presented it to an immigration official, who looked neither at my face nor at my passport picture, blindly applied a sticker, and returned the passport to me without looking up.

I went back to bed at 7:30 only to be awakened two minutes later by an announcement calling up the next Sea.  And so for the next half hour.  I had a whole 7 minutes of peace before Nic and Abby came banging at my door to carry me off to breakfast against my will.  At least I still had my pants on.

When the ship was cleared, Nic and I set off with one goal: to explore Cape Town.  We walked outside the port and over to the Waterfront, an area clearly marked for tourists.  We checked it out, but were quick to get out to see the real side of the city.  Everything we saw was beautiful, new, clean, and luxurious.  Apartments had balconies with beautiful vistas, hotel lobbies were lined with marble, and yards were well-maintained with exotic flowers.

I have to make note that South Africa has the world’s highest Gini index, a rating of economic inequality.  The poor are extremely poor, and the rich are extremely rich.  So far, we were wandering among the extremely rich, and I can’t lie, it was very refreshing.

Nic and I explored Cape Town, stumbling upon skyscrapers, a mouth-watering grocery store where we eyed the ostrich filets (but luckily hadn’t exchanged any money yet), and a Kurdish restaurant where we sat down for lunch.  We figured we pretty much got the idea and decided to get out of the city and leave for Stellenbosch – wine country.

Our waiter told us it was very far to Stellenbosch, 45 minutes by car.  To us this was nothing!  We set off for the train station, which we had already found earlier.  At the station, we find out that there is a train that leaves in half an hour.  Buying tickets was a clumsy affair, but we finally figured it out and went to the platform.

The train we got into was far from what I expected.  The car was old and tattered, the windows were so yellow you couldn’t see out of them, and there were no posters, ads, maps, or any superfluities on the metal walls.  This soon became a problem beyond comfort; we didn’t know where we how many stops away Stellenbosch would be, there was no map inside the car, and we couldn’t see any station names through the window.  At each stop, one of us would stand up on the seat to look through a window that was cracked open in search of a sign.  We were exhausted, and eventually we took turns sleeping and keeping track of stations.

It was hard to sleep because each time the train stopped there was an ear-piercing screech of metal on metal.  The train also made a few extra stops in the middle of nowhere, I suppose to let an oncoming train pass by when there weren’t enough rails, though we would wait 5 or 10 minutes until that train would finally pass us.  A 45-minutes car ride and an almost 2-hour train ride later, and we finally arrived in the wine country.

We exited the station into the pleasant and deserted countryside.  There were few buildings around us, no large roads, signposts, or anything to indicate tourists ever came here.  But the crowd from the train seemed to know where they were going, so we blindly following them into the neighborhoods.  We luckily stumbled on a sign for information and followed it to a tourism office.  We booked a hop-on-hop-off winery tour, and within 10 minutes we were on a shuttle to our first vineyard.  We spent the afternoon hopping wineries and enjoying wine tastings with a backdrop of endless rows of grapes extending far beyond until they met the mountains.

At the end of the day, we reluctantly boarded the screeching train back to Cape Town.  It was getting dark when we arrived around 7:30, and our plan was to pick up groceries and go back to the ship.  We wandered the city in cold, drizzling rain, passing from one closed store to another.  The entire city was shut down.  We soon gave up and tried to get to the ship.  Across the street from the dock area, we got horribly lost.  All the streets were dead ends, and each piece of property was bordered by tall barbed wire fences.  We were given many warnings about Cape Town at night, plus we were cold and wet (Nic even buttoned up the part of his shirt that shows off his chest hair), so we had plenty of motivation to get back quickly.  We took the long way into an area we knew and ran into SAS kids who sang country songs to us all the way home.

Sometime past 9 pm, Nic and I realized we were starving.  We hadn’t eaten since the Kurdish restaurant at 11:30, and we had just been drinking all day.  We made a last venture into the Waterfront (only the tourist area was open) and picked the first restaurant we found, hiding quickly from the SAS Mass that was only a few paces behind us.  I had the dinner of my dreams, with free water, free bread, and huge portions.  For a moment I thought I was in America!  I went to bed fed and happy that night.