Just a Typical Family Road Trip Vacation 5/25/10

I feel a bit like I am writing my homework assignment for my fourth grade teacher, “My Summer Vacation, by Lisa Poll,” because at times my trip to Capetown felt like some of the trips of my childhood. But take the typical American experience and add an African twist to everything!

I live in a guest house on the property of a wonderful family who demonstrates the traditional Afrikaaner hospitality to the point that I feel like family. They even invited me on their family trip to Capetown, a beautiful city down at the bottom tip of the continent. Everything is so breathtakingly dramatic with Table Mountain as a backdrop. It has beaches on two oceans, Atlantic and Indian. It has whale migrations, diving with great white sharks, surfing in those same waters, mountains and valleys to hike and bike, safaris and winetasting. We set out early each day in our car to explore…

It brought me back to the long days in the back seat with my sister on the family road trip. It was deja vu - the brother and sister in the back seat fighting over who’s taking up too much space, whether the window should be up or down, who drank all the water, your cheesy popcorn is stinking up the car, when are we going to stop for lunch? But then… they sing. They sing rounds with verses in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Tswana. Their young voices are so beautiful together, and in four languages! Sure beats Found a Peanut and 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

There were many times that I felt nostalgic, when I felt so much at home because an area overwhelmingly reminded me of my beloved California, only to be ripped back to the realization that in this moment I could only be in Africa. Stellenbosch, the wine country a short drive from Capetown, looked like Napa in the fall. The reds and golds of rolling vineyards in front of a line of jagged mountains. Then wham, there’s an ostrich roaming the vineyard. Add in petting a cheetah and my face painted by Xhosa, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Napa anymore.”

Then there’s Robben Island, a penal institution on an island off Capetown where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison. I felt like I was on the Alcatraz tour in San Francisco bay until a bunch of penguins went waddling by.

Then there’s Cape Point, a winding coastline of gorgeous sheer rock cliffs towering above turquoise blue waters crashing onto beach coves or rock walls. You take the Big Sur coast line and add in a family of baboons moving into your car.


When we arrived at the national park at Cape Point, we had to pay a huge park fee per person. I squawked as we drove through the gate, “How could they possibly need this much for maintenance of this park?” They handed us a brochure with a map and park guidelines. It gravely warned us to be sure to close the doors and windows of your vehicle, but it said nothing about LOCKING the doors (ominous foreshadowing). We drove to a spot said to be good for spotting whales close to shore at this time of year. We had the beach to ourselves and we all got out of the car, closing the doors and windows like the rule-abiding tourists that we are.While we scanned the sea for breaching whales, a large baboon walked up behind us and opened the car door like he'd been driving for years. He hopped in the back seat, rummaged through Andri’s backpack and ripped open a bag of chips. We stood there watching him enjoy a large bag of Fruit Chutney flavored Doritoes, unsure how to get this big creature out of the back seat. I remembered how a chimpanzee had ripped the face off a woman last year in the United States, and that was a pet. This was a wild animal, who was hungry and quite dextrous. I wasn’t about to try the “shoo” technique here. As we stood there helplessly, Mom baboon with a baby on her back climbed into the front seat and started eating my apple. Dad baboon then decided he'd rather have the apple instead of the chips and a fight broke out inside the vehicle. Turns out when agitated, baboons poop. A LOT.
Three rangers with big sticks came running and mediated the apple dispute, ejecting the family in the process. Dad baboon had grabbed my bag from the front seat and was running away. It was a sight to behold, a big baboon with a bright red bag being chased by a stick-waving ranger a long distance down this pristine white sand beach. He was able to retrieve my bag, which I didn’t have the heart to tell him only contained a pair of flip flops now covered in mooshy apple bits. Another ranger took Andri’s backpack into a restroom and washed the poop off it. The visitor center gave us the supplies to scrub the car seats and gave us big plastic garbage bags that we sat on the rest of the trip. Thank goodness for entry fees! Those rangers earned every rand.Now I am back at home. It did my soul good to be at the ocean for a bit, to lay in bed at night and imagine I am in Santa Cruz because I hear the sound of waves instead of roosters. It did my soul good to walk freely outside of a fenced compound. And yet, it did feel good to come home. That was a good feeling, feeling that my little cottage in Pretoria was home. It’s amazing how quickly we humans can adapt to change. Individually, but not as a society. I am thinking here of the end of apartheid, but that is a subject for another day...