Cape Town's Got Seeeeerious Soul
Soul... That is the reason for this breathtaking City's existence - Soul.
I do literally mean that - historically, Cape Town was founded precisely where it is entirely because this little spot on the globe has soul like few other places. To understand why, let's take a quick history lesson: By the 1650s, the Dutch had realized that they needed a predictable supply of fresh produce to thwart the ravages of scurvy that decimated ships crews during that era. The Cape - the tip of Africa - was the right place to establish it; half way between Europe and the Spice Islands of the East. Now... available to them was the beautifully safe anchorage at Saldanha - 100km / 60 miles north of Table Bay up the West coast, or False Bay - another fabulously safe harbour anchorage just a few leagues around the infamous Cape Point just south of Table Bay - yet the cantankerous old blighters that made the decisions back in the Netherlands chose the dreadful anchorage of Table Bay - nestled as it is in the embrace of Table Mountain's amphitheater arms spread southwest and northwest.
For wooden sailing ships with no way of heading into a tempest, Table Bay is a funnel... a deathtrap - Those embracing arms of the mountain that we dearly love today for the views they give us, form a bay that yawns wide open, swallowing the howling north-west gales and monstrous seas that blow in during the depths of our Souther Hemisphere August winter. Unsurprisingly then, Table Bay is the most densely packed ship graveyard on our watery planet.
It makes no rational sense to have built a town dedicated to shipping in a location so petulant of nature and patently hostile to creaking old ships... yet they did, and this begs the question - Why?
Let's push that 'why' question a bit further... Drinking water in in this bay, in those days, was tenuously fed from an unreliable stuttering stream that burbled down from a limited catchment area of Table Mountain. Even a stone's throw down the coast, in Hout Bay; named and famed for its magnificent forests in that time; there was an infinitely better anchorage, a perennial river that still runs today, and a ready supply hardwood to do ship repairs.
Worse yet; the coast of Cape Town in those days offered limited space for the town; let alone a city; to expand into and grow - pinched as it was on a small plain between the ocean and Table Mountain. Indeed, testimony to the Dutch spirit of reclaiming land from the oceans, much of the downtown area of Cape Town today is built on what used to be sea - the wrecks of long lost ships lying in the foundations of modern sky scrapers. And there's the thing - Table Mountain... that great focal point of the funnel for wrecks, and the impediment to an urban planner's ambitions, is the undisputed soul of the city; it is why the city exists. Table Mountain lends Cape Town a magical quality that is perhaps not equalled by any other place on the face of the planet - there is something deeply engaging to stand at its foot and gaze wondrously up towards its ramparts - once the base of a glacier and an ocean - now thrust a kilometer into the sky. Saldanha, the deep and protected anchorage to the north is soulless. Don't get me wrong, it's a great weekend getaway for Cape Town's city clickers - but it doesn't draw one with the same gravity that our block of mountain does. At any other place on the planet, False Bay would have attracted a fleet - but it didn't... the alternative, deadly as it was, was just too aluring. Perhaps the old salts of the British Admiralty made their fateful error in planning an assault on the Cape in the late 1700's because they looked too closely at a map, saw False Bay's grand scale, and overroad whatever intelligence they had on hand as to the burgeoning town's wherabout. The British landing at the logical but wrong location gave the bay its name - "False" Bay - the name stuck.
Thank goodness the old Dutch bean counters were for once not just focused on the bottom line of profits; absorbing the shipping losses to storms in favour of a bounty for the spirit.
Soul is not about rational sense - Cape Town was located where it is in spite of the engineering nightmare of putting it here - and I contend that it has everything to do with the deepest of human emotion that the city now squats below a giant mountain.
Imagine the terror of setting off in a wooden ship under draconian conditions of the 17th Century, bound across a lethal ocean that takes months to traverse. The half-way mark, when it is reached, needs to be more than a wharf to load ordinary goods, wenches and grog that numbs the pain and steels the nerve. You don't need to just top up on sustinance - you need a mind massage too.
It needs to be inspiring, and there can be few things more inspiring than seeing the massif of Table Mountain rising out of the horizon to greet a grizzled old sailor. So appealing was this piece of heaven to a homesick sailor, that the annals and archives are filled with mutineers and runaways abandoning their posts and sequestering themselves up into those mountains to avoid having to leave these fair shores. And, in this day of jet-set, the same echo of lust for this beautiful place beguiles nearly every tourist here - to skip the flight back home and create a new life here on our shores.
The mystics will tell you why this is - "leylines" they will confidently assert. I don't like vague terms so I Googled "mysticism of table mountain" - and although I'm not one for Chakras and Feng Shui, those in the know are most insistent that Table Mountain and the city it spawned is a primo example. I"m a much more practical guy - so I'm just in love with outright beauty, the deliciously fresh food, the laughter and relief that burbles through the streets - perhaps this is just that echo again coming down through the ages from a practical group of wigged businessmen you would not expect to have such a sensitive side. Whatever it is - you'll find that Cape Town remains the world's most sure-fire tonic to bring you back to life.
