Ghosts of Cape Town past and present; catching up with friends; side trip to Franschhoek

 Within a couple of hours of our arrival in Cape Town from the scorching Karoo semi-desert, the wind came up, the weather turned cold and a foggy blanket covered Table Mountain. On cue, I developed a snotty head-cold.

To cheer things up, here are some memories of past trips to Cape Town, some even featuring sunshine.

Ghosts of Cape Town past

And even further back to pre-digital times…

Back to the Present

This time, Roy and I stayed in a privately owned and very comfortable one-bedroom apartment (booking.com) on the ground floor of Harbour Bridge Suites, Lower Long Street, on Cape Town’s foreshore.

From there, it’s an easy 15-minute walk into the heart of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, or you can hop on and off  a useful shuttle-boat that plies between the Convention Centre and the One & Only hotel. (R50, about €3, for a full-day ticket.)

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Catching up with Friends

Everyone knows it’s impossible to make friends in Cape Town. The locals are simply not interested. Unless you were born and went to school there, the only way to make a Capetonian friend is to catch one of them off-guard and befriend him or her in another place – preferably overseas, and forcibly if necessary.

So it was with Digby and Allie, whom we met during our boating adventures on the inland waterways of France… and have been stalking ever since. After a drink at our apartment, they took us for dinner at the buzzy Life Grand Café at the V&A Waterfront.

Jonathan and Vivienne Basckin are another case in point; we met them in Durban through a good mutual friend, in circumstances where it would have been difficult for them to ignore us in the time-honoured Capetonian way. Now, effectively cornered in their home city, they invited us around to their stunning Greenpoint flat for drinks, and then took us for a delightful dinner at well-known Beluga.

What’s more, we caught up over coffee with our energetic friend Debra Fenenga (above), an old pal from Singapore days who is now living in the Cape. It was great to see her again!

Side-trip to Franschhoek

I was determined to visit Franschhoek’s Huguenot Museum to find out more about my roots – my surname, Maree, comes from one of these French Protestants who fled religious persecution from the early 16th century onwards.

This despite Jonathan Basckin having warned me that it was a poor museum, also remarking as an aside that the Huguenots were rather a third-rate lot.

He was right about the museum, as it turned out, but personally I felt just a tiny bit wounded. And wouldn’t you expect an eminent Jewish man to be a smidgen more polite about another historically persecuted tribe? (Persecution, shmersecution.)

In hopes that they would contribute to its fledgling wine production, a number of Huguenots were welcomed to the Cape during the 17th and 18th centuries, some of them settling in a beautiful valley that consequently became known as De Fransche Hoek and then Franschhoek (meaning French corner).

For me, the museum highlight was finding an 1850 map (below) showing land allocated to various French Huguenot settlers. This map indicates an association in 1780 between one Ignatius Maree and a farm called Goede Rust, in between La Motte and La Terre de Luc.

Picturesque Franschhoek is a tourist hotspot boasting wine shops and numerous French-sounding boutiques, hotels, restaurants art galleries and other high-end businesses; below are just two of many.

In truth, our lunch at the stellar restaurant Marigold Authentic Indian restaurant was the real highlight of the day – thanks for the recommendation, Vivienne!

It was outstanding: from the service and the ambience to each perfectly prepared dish, including lamb knuckle rogan josh, aloo gobi and tarka dahl (all spiced just right), to the raita and the jasmine rice.

In short, Marigold is a good reason for us to go back to Franschhoek.

Franschhoek Cellar is another. You could leave Franschhoek without buying a case or two of wine, but why would you want to?

Alors – au revoir, Franschhoek… jusqu’a la prochaine fois!