Cape Town Photos Part 2

one of the gorgeous West Cape beaches

the lighthouse at the Cape of Good Hope

Rather rashly, in my last post I promised an account of my African Adventure. So here goes...

I wasn't looking forward to travelling halfway round the world on my own, so I was relieved when I found out one of the other writers attending the workshop also lives in New Zealand, and we'd been booked on the same flights. We'd never met before, but Charlotte is the sort of person who immediately puts you at ease. She's got a wonderfully off-the-wall sense of humour, and we spent most of the journey laughing.

I'm glad Charlotte's so well-adjusted, because she certainly needed to be to cope with my attack of hysteria on the flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town. By that point we'd been travelling for almost thirty hours, and I blame my temporary loss of control on the combined effects of physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, aviophobia* and excessive consumption of ginger.**

Earlier in the journey, Charlotte, who is an absolute treasure trove of useless information, and whom I've seriously considered kidnapping for our pub quiz team, informed me that South Africa has the most official languages of any country in the world - eleven, to be exact. Being a bit of a language nerd, I'd gone off into a reverie about the practical implications this would have. I calculated, for example, that South African road signs would have to be at least thirty feet tall.

When the South African Airways stewardess handed me my corrugated cardboard tray with my corrugated carboard-flavoured meal, and I broke open the plastic bag containing the cutlery, something about the design of the cutlery bag caught my eye. Across the length of the bag was a banner, proclaiming 'CUTLERY' in the centre, with several divisions on either side, each containing unfamiliar series of letters.

'Look,' I said, waving the empty bag excitedly in front of Charlotte, 'All eleven official languages. Msu - do you reckon that's Zulu or Xhosa?' I spotted the little sugar packet, and examined that too. 'Weird,' I said. 'The word for sugar is the same as the word for cutlery in some of these languages - hang on a minute - it's the same in all of them!' My jet-lagged mind began working in overdrive, trying to come up with a possible explanation for this.
'You eejit,' said Charlotte, 'Those letters on either side aren't translations of the word 'cutlery' - they're airport codes - look, here's CPT - that's the code for Cape Town.'
'I thought it was a bit odd that that all the words for cutlery had three letters,' I said.

That's when I lost it. Once I started laughing I couldn't stop. I was laughing so hard I was in pain, and tears were streaming down my face. It was fully ten minutes before I recovered my composure. I could sense the guy sitting next to me becoming more and more uncomfortable, and I smiled at him in an effort to reassure him, but this only made the matter worse - I could almost hear him thinking, 'Why do I always get the seat next to the nutter?'

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Our one and only day off was on the Sunday, and all the non-South Africans at the workshop (us two from New Zealand, three people from the UK and one from Nigeria) decided to make the most of it and go on a day trip. Jenny, the senior UK publisher, organised a minibus trip down the coast to the Cape. Unfortunately, I had to miss the trip, because I was suffering from a rather severe and extended bout of sciatica, but Charlotte kindly donated her photos. All the photos in this post were taken by her.

Wildlife Corner

a jellyfish

a family of baboons

penguins at a penguin sanctuary

Well, that's about it for today. Be sure not to miss the next thrilling chapter of my African Adventure, an account of our hair-raising ascent of Table Mountain.

Helen


* fear of flying - I looked it up. :-)
** I'd been popping one ginger anti-travel sickness pill per hour since the journey started.