Using Public Transportation in Cape Town - A firsthand account

One of the long-standing challenges to visiting Cape Town has been getting around from place to place without your own set of wheels. The train, bus and minibus taxi services have historically been of questionable quality, reliability and safety, and are aligned to the needs of local commuters rather than visitors. Over the past few years this has been changing with the introduction of new MyCiti bus services and a major upgrade to the Cape Town Station (rail).

An intrepid soul recently decided to visit Cape Town as a tourist and get around without private (metered) taxis or a hired car, and wrote about his experience on the Trip Advisor Cape Town forum.

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Using Public Transportation in Cape Town - A firsthand account

Unique Handspring Puppetry Tour - next week only

The inspired minds at Coffeebeans Routes have developed what looks like an amazing tour experience that takes visitors behind the scenes (and in front of them) with the world-famous Handspring Puppet Company. Handspring is based in Cape Town, and won a Tony Award for their work on the Broadway theatre production, War Horse. Each of their puppets is a sculptural artwork, and the puppeteers bring exceptional empathy to their work. The tours are running during the Out of the Box Festival of puppetry, which in itself is well worth a visit or three. To book, contact Coffeebeans Routes.

Below, the blurb from Coffeebeans Routes:

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Unique Handspring Puppetry Tour - next week only

Cape Town and design - a video intro

Cape Town has been shortlisted for the designation of World Design Capital for 2014, competing with Dublin and Bilbao. WDC is designated every other year by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) to cities that are dedicated to using design for social, cultural and economic development.

The bid team just released a video overview that showcases Cape Town's design -- don't just think fashion, film, graphics, etc. This is a different approach to design entirely (but that includes some serious eye candy), and the video gives a fresh insight into the character of the city as well as introducing some of the characters who are among the creative vanguard here.

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Cape Town and design - a video intro

Indigenous People's Week 2011 8-12 August

Planeta.com, Nutti Sami Siida and friends are hosting Indigenous People's Week August 8-12, 2011. This is an online unconference focusing on Indigenous Peoples and tourism. Themes include biodiversity conservation, crafts, cultural heritage, food and literacy (traditional reading and writing and digital literacy -- the emerging read write culture).

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Indigenous People's Week 2011 8-12 August

The Darling Stagger: Early review of new Cape West Coast Trail

The new Cape West Coast Trails are going through their early trial runs ('exploratory trails' they're called). These 2 night/2.5 day trails are great getaway breaks for weekends, and being fully catered and portered, they're about as effortless as a walking trail can be.

Here's an early review of the Darling Stagger trail, which I think could become an iconic culinary experience of the Cape Town region -- wine, olives, local produce, freshly caught seafood cooked on the shore, rolling hills, white beaches, art, theatre, stunning views, fresh air...something special is coming to life here.

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The Darling Stagger: Early review of new Cape West Coast Trail

ALERT: New Cape West Coast Trails open for booking!

This is a great project I've been involved with for a couple of years now, and these amazing responsible tourism experiences are finally at the early stage of coming onto the market. Exciting to be involved from scratch and see the dream come to life. It's all managed by the non-profit Cape West Coast Biosphere Reserve to benefit local communities and conserve the environment while providing an amazing local (and slow) travel experience.

The "Darling Stagger" is la dolce vita South African style strolling through vineyards and farmlands, eating olives, cheese, tasting wine, plus San culture and the beach...and lovely landscapes everywhere. "Eve's Trail" is an awesome beach walk with marine life, archaeological sites, wildlife, and amazing seafood...bird life...pristine fynbos...wow. And these will all be Green Flag trails when they officially launch.

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ALERT: New Cape West Coast Trails open for booking!

Doung Jahangeer - seeing cities

As part of a conference and exhibition on responsible tourism in cities that I helped produce recently, we included an optional excursion which was a walk through the centre of the city of Durban guided by architect, artist and iconoclast, Doung Jahangeer. He has remarkable insights into cities, and particularly the spaces in-between the structures that we usually associate with places. If you want to learn (or be reminded) how to not just look but to see the spaces and places around you in a city - or in any community - you'd be hard pressed to find a better teacher than Doung.

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Doung Jahangeer - seeing cities

Real Mexican food in Cape Town (at last!)

Just a fly-by blog post, but a necessary shout-out to San Julian Taco & Tequila, the first and only real Mexican restaurant in Cape Town. The menu is simple with daily specials added. Only open for dinner Mon-Sat. Family run. Not inspired, but the authentic thing. The owners are from Rincón and cook accordingly, with some concessions to other Mexican regions. The hand made corn tortillas are a dream come true for me, and they sell them to take away at R30 per dozen.

Find them at 3 Rose St. in De Waterkant, +27 (0)21 419 4233, and on Foursquare.

A more thoughtful review by Tom Robbins here.

[Photos: Ron Mader, Planeta.com]

Real Mexican food in Cape Town (at last!)

Stephen Watson, poet of Cape Town, dies

Stephen Watson, one of the most insightful writers and compelling poets about Cape Town died on Sunday morning, 10 April 2011. His work was essential to my deeper understanding of aspects of Cape Town that came through in my work on the Cape Town episode of A Country Imagined, and I interviewed him as part of that project. His book, The Other City, is brilliant.

JM Coetzee wrote of him in 2000, "Whether writing about the loves of men and women or about walking out under the African stars, Stephen Watson is a better poet than his time (the expiring end of the twentieth century) and his place (squalid, beautiful Cape Town) deserve."

Below, a blog post from author Mike Nichol, on Book.co.za:

Poet and essayist Stephen Watson died early yesterday morning. His writing life is not associated in any way with crime fiction – in fact I don’t even know if he read it. But he is associated with the city of Cape Town, the city that has come to dominate the settings of our crime thrillers. One of Stephen’s ideas was that a city needed an imaginary life, something that Cape Town – or the citizens of Cape Town – seemed to resist. As he memorably put it: ‘…([W]hen its citizens and tourists go to the beach here, they step into water, colder or warmer, but not into literature’. In the collection of essays he edited about the city, A City Imagined (2006), he found that this was changing. That writers could not ‘desist from imagining and reimaging the place of our lives’. From the readers’ comments local crime writers receive, it would seem that they have become part of the imagining of this place.

In tribute to Stephen, an extract from his Afterword in A City Imagined:

A person writes so much about a place not because he belongs, but because he wants to belong. He writes about a city, seeking out its hidden coordinates, the substructures that might define it – the character of its light, the dryness of its stone – not only because instinctively, as the American writer Flannery O’Connor once put it, that ‘if you are going to write you’d better have somewhere to come from’.

In fact I did not understand, in my youth, that in writing about Cape Town I was trying to compensate for the degree to which that city, like the rest of South Africa at the time, afflicted me with a sense of homelessness. My passionate identification with the place was fuelled by a no less impassioned sense of homelessness. The stone of its streets, the sight of the sea and its confluence with sky, whether drained of light or light-filled, the precise way in which it bleached with the onset of the first winds of summer – I tried for a long time to invest such things with all that I lacked, all that was lost, and which indeed could not be found. I was one of those who write about a city, peopling it, but also trying to capture that meeting of coastline and skyline – those impalpable things – in order to define and create a home for himself, a home that does not exist – and then, beyond that, to reinvent for himself, in his own exile, a lost kingdom, the lost tradition.’

Update: full obit and appreciation from BOOK Southern Africa here. Includes links to his various publications available for purchase.

Obit from The Times (SA) here.

[Photo: BOOK Southern Africa via Flickr]

Stephen Watson, poet of Cape Town, dies

Johannesburg tour operators

I've been asked on numerous occasions for recommendations for tour operators for Johannesburg experiences. Here are a couple I've run across recently that sound good and come highly recommended, although I've not used their services myself.

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Johannesburg tour operators