The below are photos from google street view. Please click the pics for higher quality images.

This is our street. It’s a little cul-de-sac with bungalow houses, most with pretty gardens, some with drives and several cars.

This is a township that starts a few blocks away from us. It’s a small one, but it’s there.

The townships have public phonebooths that are pretty much just modified industrial shipping crates.

The barber shop.

Behind this township runs the N2; the National road that runs between Cape Town and Durban, several hundred KMs. Along this section of the N2, behind the township above, there are strings of car garages, a huge mall, a Virgin Active gym, furniture stores, motorboat warehouses, etc. They weren’t built when the Google maps van was around but there are even garages for Audis, BMWs – expensive, luxury cars.

And then, on the other side of the N2, there’s another township.

Obviously you find the depths of poverty coexisting with the upper class rich in most countries, but at least in places like the UK and America, all of the people – regardless of social caste – are culturally ‘in the same boat’. They all know that televisions aren’t magical devices and that a fever is caused by microsopic organisms and not curses, for example.

When Jaco was working in Johannesburgh he once went to the office dressed up for Hallowe’en, as ‘Jake the Peg’ (a three-legged man). The senior kitchen staff, a Zulu woman, took one look at him, shrieked, and ran off to lock herself in the maintenance closet to hide from him.

When he lectured at the college, he saw a presentation by the class studying travel. The students had to present on rail, and a group of black girls from the Alexandra township in Jo’Burg went to the ‘Amtrek’ site instead of ‘Amtrak’. Amtrek is a parody site and says things like ‘…the buffet car, where passengers try to guess who’s poodle was used on the menu’. They made their presentation based on the parody ‘facts’ from Amtrek as if it were gospel. They took it for granted that everything on the site was true and couldn’t understand why the lecturer was laughing through their presentation.

One last anecdote, also featuring the above travel students. They got on to the topic of aeroplanes and expressed wonder and confusion that something so tiny could fit so many people inside. The lecturer tried explaining that the plane was actually very big – bigger than their class room several times over – but that it just *looked* tiny in the sky because it was far away. They couldn’t grasp the concept of scale in relation to distance, and refused to believe him.

Google Map Links

Our Street

Township

Township

Township

Township

Township

Car garages

Virgin Active

Township 2

Township 2

Stop one, Kauai. Later this time than last time, so it was a bit busier, but I still got the table with the power point.

Breakfast – flat white coffee and an apple and cranberry muffin!

Hanging around outside the cinema (to my right) waiting for my movie-time. McCafe is at the end of the walkway I’m looking down, and BT Games, our preferred source of boxed PC games, is on the immediate left, with Kauai (the Hawaiian cafe I have breakfast at) directly beneath me.

McCafe for lunch after the movie. Large flat white and a panini with mozarella, chicken and tomato.

Part of a mural decorating one wall in McCafe.

I sit at the only table with a power point, at the back of the place. The good view is across the tables on the other side, looking out over the harbour.

Walking out of the mall along ‘the scenic route’. There are lines of small ships in the harbour with ‘salesmen’ calling out at the tourists. “Boat ride, Ma’am? Shark cage diving, guys? Seal trip for the ladies?”

A little side-street connecting the big mall with the little boutique-mall. There are buskers and painters under the trees and ‘Traditional African Craft’ stores on the left.

In the car just outside Cape Town, heading home. Subtle things remind me that this isn’t the UK (and it is really surprisingly similar in many ways), despite the motorways and high-rises and industry and technology and driving on the same side of the road. Things like the alien trees. (Oh, and the sunshine, of course!)

We were low on petrol heading out but would have made it to the garage half-way along the motorway had we not hit a huge traffic jam and slowed to a crawl and the gauge hit 0. We had to duck off the road and go to the garage at Cape Town International Airport. But really it was an excuse to get Magnums.

Random industry along the motorway on the way home.

Then I remembered that my photo app can do multi-exposures, so I played with that.

Parked in the underground car park so that the car was out of the sun, but it was still hot and stuffy down there!

Bought our cinema tickets then headed straight to our favourite Cafe, Mug and Bean.

They were unfortunately all out of lemonade and so couldn’t make me what I wanted – a lemonade and fresh mint crush. I had a mango frappe instead…

… and Jaco had an appletizer.

It was also gone lunch time, so I ordered some food too – spinach and feta quiche with a yummy salad

Jaco had a huge fluffy waffle with ice cream and syrup but he ate it too quickly for me to get a picture We then went to our movie. It was awesomely cool in the cinema, and I didn’t want to get kicked out so the camera went away :p

Foggy morning, light drizzle

Cafe #1 – 7am breakfast, alone at the new 24h McCafe. Flat white and a lemon and poppy seed muffin.

Cafe #2 – Kauai, alone again.

Jaco met me for his brunch, and put the carrot strips to good use.

Some builders breakfasting outside the mall at around 10am.

Cafe #3 – a bookstore cafe. I sat outside. Bacon mozzarella and avocado toasted sandwich and a filter coffee. Through the gap between the pillar and the ship I could see seals playing in the harbour.

Back to the beginning and McCafe. Caramel frappe; comfy wide swivel-chairs; River God, by Wilber Smith who was born in Central Africa.

The Wheel of Excellence.

Security guards patrolling the Waterfront area.

The busy local fish and chip shop back at our home town, Gordon’s Bay.

Ending the day with chish and fips at the beach