Happy Valentine's Day from the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres.
Yesterday was the end of the first cruise segment and the beginning of the 18 day transition from Africa to Europe, well from South Africa to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. After the windy and rough seas rounding the Cape, the wind was gone and the dock didn't move all day. Actually, the dock was very busy with an all day provisioning of the ship. The short stay 10 days ago in Cape Town didn't allow for all the ship's orders to be filled, and the long cruise between continents requires that all the ship's stores be replenished. This includes all fresh fish, fruit, and vegetables along with paper chef's hats, lots of wine and spirits, and everything else. Two fork lifts emptied an endless stream of big trailer and smaller refrigerated trucks and loading full pallets into the ship's lower decks as well as a full load of passengers and their baggage were turned around. This is a little ship, but the operation took all day. For a while, the tide prevented the fork lifts from loading the pallets on the ship. So a bucket brigade of local longshoremen and longshorewomen carried individual cases of wine up the passenger gangway. The entire crew including officers participated in the work. I would have helped too--if they would have let me...
We sailed in at 6:30 am as the "table cloth" on Table Mountain formed. The weather was glorious. So we took another round on the "hop-on, hop-off" double decker bus with the intention of taking the rotating cable car to the top of Table Mountain, the only big tourist activity we missed during our three day stay before we embarked Silver Wind on the 3rd of February. The cable car was inexplicably closed for the day, but the view from the lower station of the downtown Cape Town basin was still spectacular. We did "hop off" at Camps Bay, the sparkly white sand beach just south of the city where the rich and famous "dance the night away", said the stilted narration on the bus, when they are not blowing in the strong summer winds towards St. Helena.
During our ride around town we reflected on the modern South Africa. Here is my e-mail to a question from my new niece, Valicia, about my impressions of the changes in the way of life in this country:
My impression--based on very superficial evidence, of course--is that business has definitely changed in South Africa. The Afrikaners are still deluded and very arrogant, fulling believing that they are superior in every way although they've lost power. The reality appeared to us in all the five cities we rode through was that a very young black population has emerged of educated, well dressed, middle class, hard working upwardly mobile citizens. The native cultures are still very much acknowledged in the small towns, but like many other originally indigenous peoples, the kids look to go to college. There's a big unemployment problem and of course very corrupt political leaders, but although we saw some pretty grungy small towns and no doubt there are slums we also saw prosperous downtowns, very hard working construction and maintenance people, lots of very modern stylishly dressed young adults and teens, and everyone had cell phones. The language spoken is English in the cities for all except for a handful of old white Africankers. 80% or more are black formerly township people. Now they are running the country. We found that even security guards and complete strangers would want to chat and there was almost a formal politeness from all. It was really fun to joke with a cop or flag person on a road. The Africankers will die out, and the country may very well become a model of what an African country should be. There seemed to be no animosity towards white people, at least non-Africakaans speaking ones. Big, big difference from what I saw here 12 years ago when it was very dangerous to leave the guarded tourist areas.
No matter what the country is really like, our week and a half visit to coastal South African sights (with a few hours in Mozambique) were most enjoyable. Cape Town is a beautiful and now safe city. We had a great repeat day. We watched the grumpy, pushy, and most retro Germans leave and greeted the new groups of passengers come on. The mood of the ship immediately improved with a more regular crowd. (Hey, maybe that was the problem with the elderly Deutschlanders. They were constipated?) No matter the digestive issues, the new guests--a lighter load of 220 or so guests, about the same number as total crew--are friendly, outgoing, smiling, and by and large want to and can speak English. I look forward to queuing up and entering a bus in an orderly and polite manner. We watched the cruise director introduce the officers again, and settled down on the stern deck to watch the iconic view of Cape Town's Table Mountain fade away in the distance as the sun set to the Northwest and later the upside down half moon rise in the East or something.
We had breakfast this morning with my old friends Bruce and Susan who joined the ship yesterday for a lengthy cruise themselves. This promises to be a most delightful and enjoyable cruise. Of course, they all are. Oh, did I mention that the wind is light, the seas are more characteristically calm, and the crew is now tired from moving boxes around but happy.
Move after our anniversary celebration in Namibia. Isn't that where everyone goes for their first anniversary?
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