Cape Town’s beauty is second to none

A cable car ferrying travelers to the top of Table mountains

Cape Town, known fondly as The Mother City, easily exemplifies the best Africa has in a metropolis.

The city hugging both the Atlantic and Indian oceans is clean, scenic, beautiful and above all, a cultural melting pot with its population of blacks, coloureds, Asians and whites coexisting in varied proportions.

Like our own Nairobi, Cape Town is home to a national park rich in fauna and flora.

But their similarity ends there. Cape Town has minimum human and traffic congestion and an infrastructure that has eliminated round-abouts.

Electric trains enhance the urban transport efficiency and a cable car ferries tourists to the top of Table Mountain, a wonder of the world in its own right.

I flew into the splendour of Cape Town on a chilly afternoon, shortly after sampling the gorgeous spectacle that is Victoria Falls commonly known as Mosi–oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders), thanks to the newly-launched Kenya Airways flight KQ 782 via Livingstone.

Table Mountain was looming large and welcoming as our plane broke from the clouds ready to land. Those on the side facing the azure sea looked out for Robben Island, a tiny outcrop where Nelson Mandela and other heroes of South African liberation struggle were jailed.

Places of interest

The drive into the city of four million was spectacular over smooth roads punctuated by several flyovers. Drivers, including our own, obeyed street lights and baton-wielding traffic police officers were nowhere to be seen.

Places of interest on our route into the city included the University of Cape Town that has consistently featured in world university rankings as the leading in Africa.

Set in a verdant environment with the rocky but picturesque Devil’s Peak (part of Table Mountain) in the background, the university looks nothing but the ideal milieu for learning.

Before I reached my my hotel in the city centre, the driver who doubled as guide, drew my attention to ornate buildings by roadside.

“Groote Schuur Hospital,” he said pointing to the grand edifices with roof tiles as I peered through the window awed to be looking at the institution where the late Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant operation in July 1976.

Table Mountain, with its flat top, is iconic in the real sense of the word. Comprising a plateau edged by impressive cliffs, the rocky mountain that is 3,563 feet at its highest peak is home to an estimated 2,285 plant species, many of them endemic, and animals found nowhere else on earth.

The famous mountain and the national park it incorporates is the only place on the planet the shy dassie (pronounced dussy), a kind of rock hyrax, can be spotted easily scuttling along.

The rare Table Mountain ghost frog is endemic on the mountain. Porcupines, mongoose, tortoises and snakes are rather numerous.

The bird world is small. The feathered creatures include the large Verreaux’s eagles that have been on the decline with the decrease of dassies that they prey on.

Jackal buzzards, booted eagles, peregrine falcons are present but few. Colourful sunbirds flit on the rocks.

The mountain top overlooks the Cape Town water front and Robben Island, the 5.7 square kilometre atoll six kilometres off shore that has become a leading tourist destination for hosting Mandela’s jail.

Panning out below is a ravishing scene of The Mother City, complete with its harbour and the stadium that hosted nine 2010 FIFA World Cup matches.

The ride to the top consummated via cable car is an exhilarating experience.

A pair of revolving cable cars, so named because their cabins rotate to allow travellers 360 degree views as they run on thick, reinforced ropes does the magic.

Ferried millions

The cars, according to the establishment have ferried millions of people to the summit since the cable way was established in 1929.

Available records have it that close to a million visitors from all over the world use the cars annually to the Table Mountain tourist site alone.

A visit to Cape Town is incomplete without an excursion to the vineyards and wineries around Stellenbosch, a university town roughly 50 kilometres to the north.

This region, with a cool Mediterranean climate on the slopes of Basmaskop Hill, was once heavily forested.

The forests have largely disappeared, replaced by hectares upon hectares of grape vines and occasional olive groves.

Residents will tell you that the two crops that have become their economic backbone were introduced by French migrants escaping wars and persecution back home.

They say welcoming refugees is a virtue and not a curse. A visit to Tokara farm whose red and white wine is common in the Kenyan market was phenomenal. Visitors are given a rare opportunity to taste varieties of wine, some of which only the very rich can afford.

It was a learning session too because wine brands are referred to as ladies in wine parlance.

“She gets more appealing the older she becomes,” explained our host. “And the more she matures, the more she opens up to the taste.”

The main Stellenbosch University campus on the shoulders of Botmascop Hills is awash with lush fecundity.

The institution that acquired university status nearly a century ago in 1918 made history when in 2014, specialists there performed the first successful penis transplant.

Hailed as one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, Cape Town was in 2014 named by the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph the best place in the world to visit.

The city is South Africa’s seat of national parliament and the second largest after Johannesburg.

Its origins in the vicinity of the spot where the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the warm currents of the Indian Ocean date back to 1652 when Dutch sailor Jan Van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company docked there and established the first permanent European settlement in South Africa.

Its large Malay population are descendants of slaves from Malaysia and Madagascar brought at a time when local labour was hard to find.