I suppose plenty of people knew. But now I can count myself among them.
I arrived Friday. Bright and early Saturday morning I went mountain biking down table mountain. This is it:
The omnipresent cloud on top is commonly called the "table cloth." I hope my dad can tell me why it's there.
Mountain biking was a little more difficult than I thought it would be, especially because we went down the mountain, rather than up. And by the end my hands were killing me from gripping the brake.
There are more species of flora on table mountain than in all of Europe combined. And you can drink the spring water that runs down the mountain. Delicious.
The couple I biked with was on holiday from Israel. They were both America. One worked at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. The other worked fro UNOPS in Gaza. Needless to say, they were interesting to talk to. So in addition to the workout and beautiful scenery, I had great conversation. They were also very young and gave me good advice about working in international development.
On day two I went to Robben Island. The guides there are all former inmates or exiles. So they add an extra dimension to the experience. Our guide was chums with Mandela and Robert Sobukwe - the man who first told blacks to abandon their identification booklets and turn themselves in to be arrested. He had some pretty amazing anecdotes; many of then funny; many of them very sad.
He wove the nationalities and appearances of the people on the tour into his story of Apartheid and the liberation. He told me that under the standards of the Dutch army, I would have probably been sent to the leper camp; because I had two earrings in one ear and one in the other. The island was used as a leper colony before it housed political prisoners. This was at a time when leprosy was not well understood.
I cried when our guide told the story of how the prisoners worked in blinding quarry pits without sunglasses, many of them losing their vision from the harsh glare. To this day, no one is allowed to take flash photos of Mandela, because of the damage this did to his eyes.
The prisoners later learned that the stones they hauled day and night were not put to any use; they were just carted around the island and back to their original locations. The prisoners were overseen by 16-year-old-white boys. They knew that the boys were not evil work locking them up, they were just manipulated by an evil system. Mandela and some of the other well-educated prisoners tried to teach the guards what they learned at university on their breaks.
Like everything under apartheid, the prisoners food and clothing allotments were determined along racial lines. This former terrorist showed us the meal rations, and talked about how the Coloreds and Indians would share their food with the blacks, and they went on multi-day hunger strikes together.
Here are all my pictures.
And for those of you not in my family, here are the picture I took from my safari the weekend prior: My claim to fame on the trip was spotting a hyena. My guide told me that was very rare.
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