Capetown 1998

Part 1

Submitted by Margaret Holub

We've so enjoyed getting news of various friends' travels -- Marc and Robin all over the East, Maxine in the Ukraine, Yarrow in Kathmandu, Sage and Jo-ann in Chiapas, and of course the "Dirtpatch Dispatches" from my dad on his Caribbean route -- that I thought I'd try to capture some experiences and thoughts from the trip from which Mickey and I just returned this very afternoon -- two and a half short weeks in and around Capetown, South Africa. So I'm a little crazy and jetlagged right now, but I haven't talked to anyone about our trip (except a few minutes with my mom before she dashed off to work) -- and it hasn't yet jelled into a story, just a huge swirl of ideas, feelings, images, memories and a whole lot of questions... Seems like a good time to wrestle some of it down to type.

The reason we went to South Africa is because Mickey has been wanting to visit his beloved friend Eddie Tilanus for 28 years -- ever since they spent six months or so on kibbutz Gal-on. Mick and Eddie hadn't seen each other for 22 years, until we got wild and sent him a plane ticket to come out for our wedding, which he did. Ever since, Mick has been hankering to go to South Africa. About a year ago, after news of (Mickey's brother) Mike's pancreatic cancer, Mickey started saying, "I'm going to Capetown next February..." Eventually it came time to do it or not do it. It became a matter of seize the day. 'Round then our friend Marty, who'd been there, gave me a big pep talk about how much I'd love it too, so I decided to go. We ordered up one of those 5.9% credit cards and bought tix! Meanwhile I wrote to the big Reform temple in Capetown offering my services. I got a call just a week after I posted my letter -- woke me up at 7 AM -- from Leonard Reitstein, prez of the Capetown congregation. Turns out they'd be short a rabbi or something or other and would love to engage me for all sorts of services, classes, lectures etc. Booked...

So Feb 12 we flew and flew and flew. Lots of ocean below, then suddenly we could see land through the plane window. Beautiful spines of mountain, lots of folds and crevices. We saw nestled into a valley the brightly-colored roofs of what were obviously large, new houses. Many had swimming pools. We had to circle a few times before landing, giving us a big view below on a clear afternoon. Suddenly we circled around again and there appeared before us what looked like an endless plain of shacks, surrounded by a solid carpet of trash. We could see the shacks very clearly, each knocked together haphazardly, lopsided, dilapidated. They looked like the forts kids build out of lumber scraps. Then another sweep and we saw the big houses behind the fold of mountain again. After a few circles we disembarked in Capetown. We climbed off the plane onto the tarmac and were bussed to a terminal, where suddenly all 447 of us were crammed into an airless receiving room to go through immigration. So slow, so hot. It took about an hour, then Eddie met us, we picked up our bags, got into his funky old Mercedes and drove off on a modern-looking freeway.

I don't know what I was expecting -- in fact, many people in the next two weeks asked me that -- was Capetown as I had expected it to be? We drove along a long cement fence with the shacks I had seen from the air evident behind them, then some open space, then into a perfectly modern looking city. The Tilanus family lives in a house at Valkenburg Psychiatric hospital, which is a thing in its own right. We went through a guard shack onto the premises of quite a lovely but dilapidated campus of buildings, palm trees and such. There were a few functional, modern buildings and many others that looked to have been built in the thirties, quite gracious-looking actually. Turns out that the government is simply walking away from sections of the hospital, rather than paying to run it. The land is becoming desirable to developers, and the state plans to eventually sell it off. In the meanwhile, patients are being transferred elsewhere (farther away from the city to less appropriate settings, Eddie tells us), and the gov't is simply abandoning the buildings to looters and decay. Later on I hear from various folks that Valkenberg is a terrible, medieval hellhole of a hospital anyhow. Somehow Eddie laid hold of two empty buildings, one of which he turned into an environmental center, the other a very nice big old stucco Victorian that is their family home. They have a lease due to end in a year or so -- they've been in the house for six (?) years. They've got some chickens and geese, a lot of dry grass, and a heart-stopping view of the side of Table Mountain so close you could reach out and touch it. You can tell that the Tilanuses haven't felt like doing a lot of painting and fixing up -- it has a bit of a temporary air to it all. But it's a great old recycled house, and we're happy to arrive. We meet Helen, Jared (18) and Seth (14). Both boys have long hair. We all sit at a table in a sun room and eat fruit and drink wine and visit for many hours. I'm impressed that the kids stay with us all evening and don't look at all desperate to escape. There's a pingpong table, balls and gloves, and Mick and the guys seem to bond instantly.

Helen is a Waldorf school teacher, very devoted to her teaching. Her sister, also a Waldorf teacher up in Johannesberg, died of liver cancer just a week before we arrived. Helen is subdued and serious, but recieves us graciously. I try to tell what is her grief and what her personality and worry that this must be an awful time to have strangers descend. But here we are. They've arranged for us all to have Shabbat dinner that evening with the Cohen family, and so about 8 PM we get back in the car and drive through some beautiful neighborhoods -- lots of bougainvillea, hibiscus, leafy trees, white plaster houses. The Cohens' street has high plaster walls in front of every house -- it looks a little like pictures I've seen from wealthy neighborhoods in Arab countries. Jean and Danny Cohen's house is also big and obviously falling apart. A nice Shabbat table is set inside, but Jean apologizes that they don't have enough chairs -- several chairs are broken, and they have rigged up a bench of boards. Before dinner Jean takes us out the back door and shows us a beautiful, overgrown garden and tells us, a little tearfully, that they have just sold the back yard. In fact the subdivide includes the last room on the ell of their house. Dinner is challah (called "kitka") and some small bowls of hummous, taramosalata and such. Danny is a serious fellow who sits next to me and tells me about learning tai-chi and meditation from his acupuncturist. Jean teaches piano at the Waldorf school (she gives private lessons on the campus -- a system I've not heard of before.) They have four sons, all, apparently, accomplished musicians.

Next morning we all pile in the car, Seth squeezed into the front seat with Helen, and take a long, gorgeous drive down to Cape Point, the bottom of the Cape of Good Hope. We see lots of sweet little beach towns and glorious white sand beaches. The bottom of the cape is a nature reserve, and a fine specimen of fynbos (pronounced something like fane-bose), a special pygmy-forest-like ecosystem. It looks like low scrub, windswept, lots of heathers, proteas, and rustios (a jointed grass genus). We see a baboon on the side of the road, later, as we are walking around, an eland, which looks something like a gnu in a kids' picture book. There's a lighthouse we climb up to with a millon other tourists. Later we go watch the windsurfers and soak up the first sun my skin has felt in about eight months! Coming back we turn a corner to another gorgeous beach, and Eddie mentions that during apartheid this was a colored beach. I marvel a bit that it is so pretty and try to guess how this one got so designated. Later I read that the windy beaches with the dangerous riptides were designated for black and colored swimmers, but I don't know for sure if this is the case here.

Next day to Kirstenbosch Gardens, beautiful, heavenly gardens, but the best part is an outdoor exhibit of large stone sculptures from Zimbabwe, very modern and timeless at the same time. A lot of them made me want to cry, so full of feeling...

{End of Part 1}

(Capetown 1998 - Part 2)

Copyright Margaret Holub 1998

Last updated 03/12/98 (RGE)