But first – shark news:-

Bouncing about in a cage in a force 5 with sharks skimming past a few centimetres from my nose was way less scary than I expected.

Visibility in the cage is very poor. The best place to see the sharks that appear once they throw the baited ropes into the sea is on the top deck of our boat. Best to avoid the front of the boat with the pukers, easily spotted with their green/grey complexion and sick bags glued to their faces.

I thought it strange that the sharks didn’t just wolf down the bait straight away but Clive thinks they like to have a nibble first to see if they like the taste. They are copper sharks, aka bronze whalers.

There are no Great Whites about as the Orcas have been eating them, in particular their livers, so they’ve all buggered off down the coast to Mossel Bay. Why it’s safer there, I don’t know.

The on/off wine tram in Franschhoek.

The wine tram is kind of a scam, as it’s really a very short track of train and mostly buses, but no-one cares as we are all trollied and can barely remember our names let alone write a Trip Adviser review.

We arrived at our first vineyard at 11.30 am as three separate small groups, but when we reboard the bus an hour later we are a decidedly tipsy unit.

By the third vineyard the Zulu/ Leeds contingent are singing three part harmonies to a goat and the Dutch couple we have been chatting to are losing not only their English language skills but their Dutch too.

The Franshoek vines were originally planted by 300 French Huguenots who fled France in 1688 after King Louis XIV banned Protestantism. Shout out to the Holmes family on Clive’s side of the family, as they were Huguenots but fled to England.

The vines bake on North facing hillsides producing delicious wine varieties, although I couldn’t tell you which wine to buy as by the third vineyard they all tasted the same. But as a fall from grace after 9 months of sobriety it took some beating.

Visiting a township.

Cape Town is a city of two halves. Part polished and beautified, with fantastic food and wine, sandy beaches, a freezing sea, and Table mountain looming above it all. It has its share of historic buildings, many of which have troubled histories. The court house, where if they really couldn’t decide if you were coloured or white they stuck a comb in your hair.

If it stayed in, you were coloured. Fell out, white.

Nearby is The Slave Lodge, which is still called “The biggest 19th century brothel in Cape Town” in some aricles online, with no mention that the women were slaves.

Most visitors don’t see the other half of Cape Town because it can be dangerous to visit. A British surgeon was shot while driving back from whale-watching in Hermanus. His wife, mother and 2 year old child were also in the car and survived. The main freeway to Cape Town being shut due to a strike, his GPS had directed him through a township adjacent to Langa.

We visited Langa with Louis, a local tourist guide, who had spent 2 years during Covid living under a tarp being fed by kindly neighbours. The first Township, Langa was built in 1923 to segregate the black African community from urban areas and served as a labour resevoir. It still does. Visiting a Township felt like a difficult call, but I wanted to see for myself where the majority of coloured people still live.

Our guide told us that they want tourists to come, and that his job showing us around had been a revelation to him, meeting white non- South Africans who unlike the local whites were interested and cared about their situation (his words). He told us that the Township is bigger than ever, as squatting laws mean if you build a hut i.e a 1 meter square corregated iron box, and remain there for 48 hours, you have the right to remain there.

Watching a group of children dancing and singing to a crowd of local people chilling in Langa on a Saturday afternoon I felt simultaneously interested to see African music performed for African people and hugely conspicuous in our nosy whiteness.

Poverty Porn is the idea that by writing about it I am objectifying it. But by not writing about it I’d be sweeping it under the carpet. But watching a performance by local artists who have not been wheeled out for us, the tourists, to gawk at did feel different. The main streets have surveillance cameras overlooking them, but Louis took us deep into the heart of the Town, to show us the streets that regularly flood, the water pump serving hundreds on a street corner, the portaloos. It is difficult to imagine how people get to work in places like the waterfront in central Cape Town looking spic and span when they live in these conditions. But they do.

We’re now in Harnas, a wildlife sanctuary in Namibia. We are properly busy, exhausted, and the wifi is crap!