A sign of hope at the Cape of Good Hope

Our first full day in South Africa didn’t start out too hopefully.  Ralph thought it would be a good idea to get some experience driving bassackward on the quiet roads near where we stayed the night, south of Cape Town.  I agreed.  In less than a minute Ralph 1) went to the wrong side of the car to get in, 2) couldn’t get the car into reverse (shifting with the left hand is pretty tricky!), and 3) started driving down the right (wrong) side of the road.  He improved pretty quickly, obviously, because he drove most of the day, and we’re still alive.

We drove out as far as we could on the Cape and then walked the rest of the way to the old lighthouse.  Once again, the wind was just blowing like hell.  Ralph is not lifting his shirt in this picture.  The wind is doing it for him.  We were both very glad to have that low stone wall behind us because a couple of times we were blown into it as we tried to stand still for this picture.  My hat was blown off my head a couple of times but fortunately both times it got stuck 40 or 50 feet away from me so I was able to retrieve it.  This becomes quite important later on….

We hiked around the Cape a bit; the views up the Atlantic coast  and out to lands end were just amazing.

 

The thing that really made my day, however, was the scene depicted in this picture:

This was a class of high school girls out on some sort of field trip from Cape Town to the Cape of Good Hope.  The thing that struck me immediately is that there were girls of all races in the class.  Granted, there were far more white girls than blacks or “coloreds” (mixed race).  Granted also that the black girls were undoubtedly from the very highest tier of the socio-economic spectrum of blacks in this country.  Nonetheless, I was witness to the actual mixing of the races in South Africa.  I know, I know.  This is old news.  South Africa became a democracy in 1994.  But this scene was totally impossible, illegal actually, when I was last in Southern Africa.  The Apartheid regime was completely in control of South Africa during my Peace Corps Years, 1969-1972.  I actually never visited South Africa at that time because American PCV’s were persona non grata in SA at that time.  Sile, being Irish, was not under this restriction.  Those of you who haven’t heard the story should ask her about being followed by a South African “secret” policeman the whole time she was in Durban with a class of students from Lesotho.  (The reason “secret” is in quotes is that, according to Sile, the guy wore a trench coat the entire time, despite the fact that it was summer and Durban is a beach town.  He was hard to miss.)

Next stop:  Cape Town.