We’d booked our Robben Island tour with Booking.com before we came away, and had been given strict instructions to pick up the tickets before the day from the ferry terminal. This actually didn’t turn out to be quite correct according to the ferry terminal lady, so we went away and Deb had a most unsatisfactory conversation with booking.com’s AI bot who could only attend to accomodation inquiries. Thankfully, we were able to contact the actual ticket agency to provide the tickets. The stress relating to the ticket status proved unfounded and we walked straight on to the boat as planned.
The ferry takes about 30 minutes to arrive at Robben Island where we were directed to get on a bus for a quick tour of the island. The tour guides are ex-inmates and our guide in the bus articulated his difficult story well. He was arrested as a 16 year old, detained without trial, beaten and finally sentenced to 5 years on Robben Island. He talked about the brutal treatment and isolation he endured. It was a poignant reminder of the past. Robben Island also had a time as a leper colony, before being converted for the detention of mostly political prisoners. We stopped for a quick break to photograph the view back to Capetown and the mosque.
Following the tour, we were then handed over to another guide, who took us through the different cell blocks and talked more specifically about the the things that happened to him here. Probably most challenging was how some inmates where as young as 13. While not as well told as the the previous guide, his story was still compelling. As we went through the respective cell blocks we eventually viewed the cell Nelson Mandela spent 18 years in. The prison on Robben Island was closed in 1991 when the detention of politcal prisoners was no longer required.
After returning to Capetown it was time for some lunch. We were already at the V&A waterfront, so we picked the Fish Market. We shared a couple of meals, a prawn and mussell linguine and some sole and calimari, with the chips swapped out for vegetables, still honouring our good eating intentions. The meal was tasty although the ambience was hampered by a couple watching videos on their phones on speaker. This Section of the V&A waterfront pays homage to Victorian architecture as well as having some fun with rhino and elephant statues.
After lunch we visited MOCAA, the Museum of Contemporary African Art. MOCAA is in a build that has been adapted from three disused grain silos. We often find modern art can be a bit ‘hit and miss’ and we appreciated the building design more that the art exhibits. We did visit a couple of commercial galleries in the area and were impressed with some of the sculpture works and the hyper-real charcoal drawings.
We came back to the apartment, with our day seemingly done. I had this bright idea to go to the local beachfront at Seapoint to take sunset photos. The plan didn’t quite work out, but I walked almost seven kilometres and not really seen any better sunset opportunities than Camps Bay on Thursday. The beachfront varies between the modern installations like Mandela’s Glasses to the the classic Green Point Lighthouse, the oldest lighthouse in Africa that operated from 1820 – 1991. I took some nice golden hour photos on the promenade too.
Until tomorrow!
Leave a Reply