South Africa - Part one: Cape Town

In December I went with my cousin Heather to visit her parents who are on a mission in South Africa. Here are some pics and a few stories/explanations.



All of you Football (Soccer for those of us in the States) fans know that the World Cup is going to be held in South Africa in 2010. They are ramping up for it. Building new stadiums all over the country. The funny thing is, there is no parking around any of the stadiums. No one there really have cars... I don't know how they are going to transport the large numbers of players and fans to the stadiums, some of them pretty remotely located. I heard there was talk of bringing in buses but the local taxi drivers didn't like the buses taking their business and were shooting the bus drivers. So probably not buses.


This is my Aunt Mia and Uncle Harley with the recent graduates from the 'Ye Shall Have My Words' literacy program. My Aunt and Uncle aren't giants, though they are taller than me...


Typical housing for a lot of the people they teach. You can see the power lines coming off the light poles. Most of these homes will have one bare bulb for lighting and an electrical outlet. Often toilet facilities are communal yet they still manage to come to church in pristine white shirts and ties.


We visited a couple of church buildings with this layout. Four prefab trailers were arranged to form a covered courtyard in the middle. One was larger (a double-wide maybe?) and used for Sacrament Meeting. One was a restroom. The others were divided in to multiple rooms and were used for Sunday School, Primary, Relief Society, Priesthood, etc.

We traveled first to Cape Town. It is a beautiful city, but very windy while we were there. You can see the whitecaps in the ocean.

This is the waterfront in Cape Town. I was checking out some sea lions in the water below.

This clock tower at the Waterfront was a very good site, when we finally got there. When we first arrived in town we asked people at the hotel, "Where can we get tickets for the double-decker bus tour?" and they told us by the clock tower at the waterfront and wave their hand toward the general direction of the ocean. The way they were saying it made it seem like only a couple of blocks so we headed out on foot towards the waterfront. It turned out it was quite a ways and we ended up walking in all directions for over 3 hours totally clueless before a kind local woman went out of her way to walk us down to a point where we couldn't get lost. We gave her taxi fare so she could get where she was going.

The view of Cape Town from the cable car station at Table Mountain. It was really windy up there.

This was my breakfast one morning. It was Belgium pancake wrapped around a banana with cinnamon, sugar and caramel sauce. Yummy!

This was lunch another day. It is a stew made with a couple of local antelope species and served with rice. That whole cauldron was all for me. It was very, very good.

Heather said that her husband Zac wanted her to bring home a Great White. We took this picture of Heather and her mom at the Natural History Museum instead.

They did offer cage dives so you could get up close and personal with the sharks, but this is as close as I got...

This is the view of Robben Island from Cape Town. Robben Island is like South Africa's Alcatraz. It has a long and varied history of usage since the 1600's.

It's been a Leper Colony. (The graveyard is all that is left. They burned all of the other buildings when the colony was closed to avoid contamination.)

It's been a convent.

And most recently, it's been a prison where political prisoners like Nelson Mandela were held. This is the entrance from the dock.



This building held one prisoner in solitary confinement for many years. I don't remember his name, but after several years, he had a visitor who reported that he was unable to speak after not using his voice for so long. The buildings in the background were built later as kennels for the guard dogs.


This is a limestone mine where the prisoners would be forced to work. Most prisoners who were kept on Robben Island suffered eye damage from the glare of the rock. Because limestone had so little value, they stopped mining it and just had the prisoners move a big pile of it from one side of the mine to the other and then back again. The cave in the picture is a place that they would go to rest and relax. It was also in this setting that they would teach eachother. One of the things required by international aid organizations was the opporturnity for education. As a result most prisoners left with advanced degrees earned through correspondence courses. The attitude of the political prisoners was very accepting, even allowing guards who were interested in learning to join them. They saw the guards as victims of a bad system as much as they were. The government found that the guards became too sympathetic with the prisoners and started limiting the time they would serve on Robben Island before being transferred. They also tried for a time to put the political prisoners with real hardened criminals but found that they too were positively effected by their contact with the political prisoners so that stopped too.


This is a typical cell where 80 or more men would be housed. There is no glass in the windows. They fought the elements year round.



Political prisoners were of many faiths and races. This mosque was built on Robben Island to honor one of them. (I don't remember his name and probably couldn't spell it if I did...)



This is the view of Cape Town and Table Mountain from Robben Island. Very pretty.


This is my "I was there" shot from Robben Island with Table Mountain and Cape Town in the background.


Robben Island has the 3rd largest population of African penguins. It was really fun to watch them move around and play in the water. I almost missed the ferry back because of these guys.