The Southern Most Point in Africa with Baboons
South Africa
At her insistence for our safety and to allow for more time to gab, Natasha picked us up in Stellenbosch in her little buckey (a small truck with a cab covering the box) and drove us back to Camps Bay (Cape Town) for our next couple of night’s accommodation. We stayed at this awesome place called Stan Halt Youth Hostel. There weren’t that many people there and the owner seeing that we were a couple, decided to put us in an empty dorm. We had been staying in dorms since we got to SA to save money and it was nice to have a room to ourselves again. The youth hostel is situated on Kloof road next to the Round House in the Glen area. It’s about ten minutes walk through the bush down to the town and onto the beach. It is one of my favourite beaches. Behind you are the Twelve Apostles a chain of high, craggy mountain tops that run the length of the beach and further on down the point. In front of you is the revitalizing and refreshing water of the Atlantic currents. We saw pods of dolphins swimming by just happily jumping through the air and splashing back down into the blue depths again. Our first day there was the best as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the water was warm. Tourists and locals alike were out in droves trying to get a tan. I saw so much skin and topless women; I wondered if we had wandered onto a nude beach but it wasn’t the case.
Camps Bay is an upper class area and mainly white. After buying a few groceries we decided to leave the area and hike the fifteen minutes back up to our hostel. We took a seat outside our louver doors amongst trees with chirping birds, flowering garden, mounds of drooping bougainvillea and watched the sun set into the ocean.
We hung out there for the next couple of days and relaxed. We went to the beach a few times until the Cape Doctor visited us. The Cape Doctor is a wind that comes from the southeast and blows away all the crap that has built up in the air. Unfortunately, it can blow for days and days and when you are on the beach, it picks up the sand and whips it around and it feels like your skin is being sand blasted. Cape Town has the reputation for a being a windy city and if you live there, you either have to be resigned to the fact that it will always be like that or you will go crazy.
We met up one night with one of our colleague’s friends for some wine and good talk as we watched another sunset. They were kind, bright, funny and spirited. It pays to be friendly and make friends with people from other countries because it almost always results in you having a better time, learning about something any ordinary tourist wouldn’t or, you may be even lucky enough to experience their unconditional hospitality.
Such was another example when another former colleague of ours, Mel, came to pick us up and take us to the Cape of Good Hope as it is sometimes called. It has the southern (I believe) and south-western most point of continental Africa. On the way we drove through a protected park, which had baboons roaming about. We didn’t see any until we arrived at the bottom of the trail leading to the lighthouse at the top of the headland. While a tourist sat outside a restaurant, a baboon casually walked up behind her and picked up her plastic orange juice bottle and began gnawing on it. Their teeth are designed, and set, in a way that they are continually sharpening themselves so it had little difficulty in puncturing the bottle. It was only after about ten seconds or so, the tourist noticed that the baboon was behind her and at that moment, a staff member came out of the restaurant and casually threw a stick in its general direction and the baboon fled with the bottle. Apparently, they can become quite a nuisance and human interference is squarely to blame.
Have you ever noticed how most people, mainly tourists, from all over the world feel compelled to feed a wild animal? What is it that people don’t get that nine point nine nine times out of ten that the food that they are giving them is crap? Even more sickening is seeing caged animals, like we saw in Suanbo, Korea, being fed gum. The chimp just ate the whole thing, wrapper and all and the so-called care takers couldn’t do a thing because they weren’t even there. As for the baboon in the Cape, they have developed a taste for fish that is not a part of their natural diet. I read a sign that for some reason, they have even attempted to eat clay, perhaps two signs as good as any that human interference has had a negative influence on an animal’s behaviour. Later on, as we drove to the Cape of Good Hope, we came across more baboons walking across the road. We quickly rolled up the windows and drove by.
It was a pretty fun and scenic drive as we went hung out with Mel and caught up on the latest goss. Oh, if you see a Brian Brown movie with sharks in it, we were on location as we drove through back to Camps Bay. We drove through Haut Bay where, two weeks earlier, a woman who had been swimming in the same place for years, was taken by a shark. Only a hat was left behind to signal that something might have been amiss. Speaking of sharks, lets get one thing straight; it’s pretty bloody rare that someone gets taken by a shark and even then, people get nipped more out of curiosity than for food. I’ve been told that they don’t like bony people like us, they much prefer seals with all that blubber. Of course, that’s not a comforting thought when you have a gaping hole in your midsection. Nevertheless, the media and people like myself sensationalize the incidents to a degree that seems to indicate that shark attacks happen more often than they really do. However, you are more likely to get hit by a passing motorist so get outta the f*#kin’ way!
