To Mossel Bay and Beyond!

Hello from Oudtshoorn!

Mossel Bay came and went. Justin and I took an evening bus out of Cape Town on Monday after a rather drizzly, uneventful final day and a last Capetonian dinner at a fantastic Ethiopian restaurant with live music that we'd found a few days before. We said goodbye to Sifiso with honest hopes to see him again at some point in the future and left for Mossel Bay, a destination chosen pretty much at random.

We arrived in the town just after midnight, after a 5-hour bus ride that barely moved our location on the map of South Africa at all. It was disappointing to not be able to see anything out the bus windows - I have no idea what the landscape between the two cities looks like - but at least the lack of scenic distractions allowed us to focus our complete attention on the old Clint Eastwood movie that played twice in a row on the bus TVs (I missed the part that explained how he ended up in El Paso on the first viewing, so it's lucky I got to watch it again. Phew!)

We'd called ahead to arrange a lift from the bus station to our accommodations, and our bashful young hotelier arrived shortly after our bus let us off. We thought we'd booked a hostel - the price was pretty cheap - but when we arrived at the Little Brak Beach House (which was quite a ways outside Mossel Bay proper), it turned out to be more like a delightful bed and breakfast right on the water. It even had a resident cat! I was entirely pleased. It lacked only some sort of indoor heating system in order to make it perfectly complete.

We awoke on Tuesday to piercingly blue skies, sunshine, and our hotelier's mother calling us to breakfast in her almost-unintelligible Afrikaans-accented English. After bread and muffins, our ever-helpful host, Phillip, offered us a ride into town (I'm pretty sure we were the only two guests at the whole place). We loaded into his car, but had only gone about a block when he glanced over at the ocean, hooted, and pulled a U-turn at top speed. Justin and I were completely dumbfounded until Phillip pulled to a stop at the shoreline and pointed. Hundreds of seabirds were circling, floating, and diving in the water only a few dozen yards off the beach. "It's the baitball!!" Phillip exclaimed, grabbing his cell phone and excitedly dialing some friends. "We've been waiting all month!"

I was completely ignorant about this ocean phenomenon, but Phillip explained that, as the sardines make their annual mating pilgrimage towards Durban, they are followed by seabirds, dolphins, and sharks that slowly compress them into an ever-tighter ichthyological lump, and then just pick off their meals from the mass. Unfortunately, we didn't see any dolphins or sharks jump (how awesome would that have been??), nor did we see the ball itself - Phillip told us that, when the water is completely still, you can actually watch through the water as the teeming ball of fish travels past the beach. All we saw was the birds, but the fact that we happened to be in the right place at the right time for even that much is pretty incredible.

After the baitball excitement, we headed into Mossel Bay, and our host dropped us at a trailhead for a beautiful hike along the seacliffs. The waves below were astounding: they were giant, and the water was such a clear blue that I could see how the troughs were marbled with red and brown sand before they crested and exploded in a frothy frenzy. After hiking for a couple hours, we saw some fascinating-looking tidepools below and found a pretty easy trail that led to them by winding down the cliffs. The pools were beautiful: they were full of tiny starfish and red and green seaweed; with the blue and white ocean and the dusty brown rocks, it was a truly lovely spot.

The weather quickly turned gray, though, and sudden gusts of wind began blowing so hard that I actually started to worry about getting blown off the cliffs, so we hiked out apace, arriving back in town ahead of some menacing-looking clouds.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the little town and waiting for the inevitable rain to arrive. Mossel Bay was interesting mainly for the different slice of South African culture that it displayed. Man, if I'd thought central Cape Town was gentrified, I hadn't seen anything yet...Mossel Bay was so manicured that it looked like a place you'd take your ailing great auntie for an afternoon of sunning. Sure, there were still a few kind of sketchy places, like the minibus depot, but even that seemed pretty sterile. The town was by far the most unapologetically Afrikaner place I've seen yet. The Afrikaners are the descendants of the first Dutch colonizers; though I can claim to know very little about South Africa and its people, I have heard from locals that the diehard Afrikaners comprise the conservative Caucasian faction. Much of the public written material in Cape Town (street signs, posters, etc.) was in both Afrikaans and English; I was surprised to find that in Mossel Bay, however, many signs were in Afrikaans only. When I asked Phillip if there are many people who speak Afrikaans who do not also speak English, he rolled his eyes and said that there are indeed many in Mossel Bay (or Mosselbaai, as they'd say). He described them as people who still resent the British takeover of the South African colony in the early 19th century and who wax nostalgic for the days of apartheid. While no generalizations are ever entirely true, of course, it was still really interesting to observe a town that seems to be holding onto its colonial past as tightly as modernity will allow.

This morning and afternoon were persistently rainy; we ate a leisurely breakfast and then spent a few hours in town at the Bartolomeu Dias museum (he was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, though neither he nor anyone else knew at the time that he'd done so; apparently Mossel Bay was the place where he first came ashore after rounding the bend and turning north again.) The museum itself was rather lackluster, with an odd collection of seashells, boat replicas, and posters about Nelson Mandela; the highlight was undoubtedly a GIANT, moss-covered prehistoric skull and spine that lay, with absolutely no explanation, in the middle of the garden. I have no idea what sort of creature it came from, and everyone else was just walking around it as if it were a completely normal piece of lawn furniture. Indeed...

We boarded a bus in the late afternoon for the town of Oudtshoorn, northeast of Mossel Bay in the (supposedly) drier grasslands (though it's freezing and rainy outside right now) known as the Little Karoo. We've already booked ourselves on a 56 kilometer bike ride (whee!) starting early tomorrow, so I'd better go get some sleep!