|
"Twenty four hours after the famed Blue Train leaves the showcase administrative city of Pretoria, twenty three hours after it departs grimy Johannesburg, something quite miraculous happens. After a day and a night of slicing through the brown, dusty diamond and gold bearing land of southern Africa, from the western Transvaal through the velt of the Orange Free State into the arid karoo of the Cape Province, the elegant carriages move through a long tunnel and emerge into a soft, green, rolling, flowered realm more European than African."
So writes Glenn A. Baker about his entry into Cape Town, South Africa's 'Mother City'. One year older than New York, it sits spectacularly beneath the imposing Table Mountain (with its oft-present cloud cover, ‘the tablecloth’), seen from a hundred kilometres away as a great smoky, grey-blue shadow, a brooding, commanding presence which draws the eye like a hypnotist’s watch chain as it generates its own unique weather effects and colourings. The modern, engaging city, with the flower sellers of Trafalgar Place, the busy flea markets of Greenmarket Square, the wrought iron-graced Victorian buildings of Long Street, the 350 year old Company’s Garden and Bell Tower, the Dutch East India Company slave lodge converted to a Cultural history Museum, and the Malay Quarter with its cobbled streets, mosques and flat-roofed pastel shaded houses, is the doorway to the spectacular Cape Peninsula, described in the 16th century by explorer Sir Francis Drake as "The fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth." It is home to vineyards, wineries, cool valleys, rolling hills, chocolate box-lid villages, surf-caressed bays, shipwrecks, spectacular vantage points, white steepled churches, intensely green fields of grain and, in extraordinary contrast, tumultuous townships.
1985 words. Images available
|
