46664

B Section courtyard, Robben Island, South Africa
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Thursday - 0600: Woke to no rain. Good sign and maybe I will have a chance to get to Robben Island today.

0800: After breakfast, I walked to the Company's Gardens. The gardens were used by the Dutch when Jan van Riebeeck established the Cape Colony as a way station in 1652 and used to provide passing ships with fruit, vegetables and fresh meat (traded from the Khoisan). The gardens today sit between Adderly and Annandale streets. The gardens were slowly converted into a botanical and ornamental garden, although the growing of vegetables did continue for a number of years. There are many museums surrounding the gardens. The architecture is amazing.

Tuynhuys (the Garden House) in the Company's Garden, Cape Town. It has always been the home of the Governor of Cape Town, but now used by the President for photo opps with visiting dignitaries.
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At the Adderly Street entrance there are the Houses of Parliament. South Africa actually has 3 capitals and Cape Town is the legislative capital. The architecture is neoclassic and dominates the north end of Government Ave. A statue dedicated to Queen Victoria in honor of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 sits at the north end of the building.

There is also a statue of Cecil Rhodes in the middle of the gardens. Rhodes was a Brit who moved to South Africa as a teenager and quickly grew in stature as a businessman and politician. He founded the De Beers Mining Co. in 1880 after the great diamond discoveries in Kimberly. He was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1895) and created the nations of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe).

Great Synagogue & Holocaust Mesuem
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Maybe because it was early, but the gardens were not very crowded. There were school kids waiting for the South Africa Museum to open.

I visited St. Georges Cathedral on Adderly Street near the entrance to the Company's Gardens. St. George's Cathedral was built out of sandstone from Table Mountain and opened in 1908. It is seen as the mother church of the Anglican community in South Africa and became especially well known thanks to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu during the Apartheid era and was a sanctuary for demonstrators. Incredible stained glass windows adorn all sides of the cathedral.

South Africa Museum and Planetarium
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I plan to come back to the gardens since it is such a short walk from LSB. I am getting hungry and need to book a ferry to Robben Island. The weather was clearing, so I think I will be able to make it right after lunch. I walked down to the V&A Waterfront and booked a seat on the ferry. The ferry ride/tour is only R 150($20) and is an all morning or all afternoon event. I had lunch at Cape Town Fish Market again (big surprise). Today they had a selection on the belt called a wasabi parcel..basically a wasabi sandwich with rice as the bread. I don't know if it is all wasabi or a green filling flavored with wasabi. I was tempted, but chickened out. Went with the usual salmon rose and eel roll with a couple of glasses of chardanney.

Statue of Cecil Rhodes, Company's Gardens, Cape Town
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It was a beautiful morning but in typical Cape Town winter fashion, it started to rain just as we boarded the ferry. It rained through most of the tour and decided to clear up on the ride back to Cape Town. Robben Island was actually named by the Dutch and robben is a dutch word for seal because many seals inhabited the island when they decided to make it into a prison. For nearly 400 years, Robben Island was a place of banishment, exile, isolation and imprisonment. It was here that rulers sent those they regarded as political troublemakers, social outcasts and the unwanted of society.

Amazing archetecture of Cape Town
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It has served many others purposes including a leper colony, WWII battery and most recently a prison for ANC political prisoners arrested during the 60's – 80's. The bus tour was informative, but because of the rain, the windows were fogged up and could not see anything that the tour guide described. The warders and their families actually lived on the island and during the heyday, was quite nice they say with schools, tennis courts, golf courses and a hospital. We then were taken to the maximum security prison where Nelson Mandela (prisoner number 46664, prisoner number 466 imprisoned in 1964) spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island living a life of hard labor in the lime quarries. I learned he much of the work in his autobiography "A Long Walk to Freedom" was written in Robben Island. He would hide the manuscript in the B Section courtyard and it was eventually smuggled out of the prison. In 1997, Robben Island was turned into a museum and memorial to those who suffered imprisonment Many of the former political conduct daily tours of the prison. There were colored (mixed race) and black prisoners. Even in prison, the prisoners were segregated where the colored prisoners were treated better. They were given more clothes and shoes to wear and better rations. Under apartheid, there was not just segregation between whites and blacks, but also Asians and coloreds were treated poorly. They were renovating parts of the museum so Nelson Mandela's cell (B Section Cell 5) was empty.

View of Cape Town from Robben Island with Table Mountain covered in a huge "tablecloth"
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7:00: Got back to LSB and cooked the other half of the ground ostrich I bought and watched some of the French Open and caught up on my journal. I hear that Thursday is a big party night on Long Street, I hope I can sllep through it.