Robben Island and Table Mountain

Saturday June 27

I was awake at 3:30 am, unable to go back to sleep, spent two hours reading My Sister’s Keeper, a well written book by Jodi Piccoult about the complications of parenting children with adverse needs and thirty minutes exercising with my bands before indulging in breakfast. I had our traditional breakfast of coffee and toast with butter and jam. However, this morning I had the additional treat of two Satsuma like oranges, which we bought from a street vendor, two bags for 5R, 5 South African Rands; the equivalent of $2.50 American. We bought so many of them that now in the morning for breakfast, Kay (0ne of our group leaders) is pushing oranges like they're crack, but they are delicious.

We left the hotel around 8 am and spent two hours in a guided tour on Robben Island, the prison island where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment - his cell, 4x4,(picture) with no bed and no chair, sleeping on the ground with a straw mat and three thin blankets. Our tour guide, a formal political prisoner, a fellow inmate of Mandela’s, shared with us stories about how Mandela and the older political prisoners would send messages via tennis balls to the younger separated prisoners who were brought to Robben Island following the Soweto student revolt in the late 70’s. They would put messages inside the tennis balls and hit them over the walls "accidently" to other cell blocks. It was a dark cold place that Mandela had to live in, and his survival and hopeful spirit is obviously meaningful to today’s South Africans. Across from me in the communal cell through one of our guide’s speeches, a lovely South African girl, perhaps a college student, certainly no older than 25, mouthed the prisoner number of Mandela as our guide spoke it aloud -the expression on her face, one of great reverence.

Following the bumpy ferry return to the main land from the island, we were bussed over to Table Mountain to spend two hours riding the cable car to the top. It is without a doubt one of the most spectacularly beautiful places I have ever seen. From the top of the mountain one could almost feel a god like power, literally walking across clouds to see the lives from above.
For dinner, we went down two blocks from the hotel to Mario's a family owned Italian restaurant. We had the best server, Gavin Jacobs, a school teacher himself. His school is out on vacation for the next two weeks, but we would like to go visit when we return to Cape Town. He told us about his curriculum and his needs. We all chipped in to leave an extra nice tip for him so that he could buy more school supplies.