"Shosolosa!!" Cape Town by Ramonq

click: South African music

The foreboding and dominant presence of Table Mountain over the Cape Town will forever haunt your memory of the ciy. Like a tsunami that's about to engulf this beautiful Southern African city, Table Mountain is also a unique ecosystem which hosts a variety of flora that do not exist anywhere. The mountain beckons you to climb it up and explore its wonders. I found the trek up the top exhilirating and exhuasting but the views from up there is utterly breath-taking.

Company's Garden

Slighlty less the 1100 metres, Table Mountain is Cape Town's foremost icon. It has a vast plateau that's completely flat and from up there you'll be able to see the various suburbs that make up Cape Town. Here you can see the city expanding westwards to the plains of Cape Flats with some of the worse slums in South Africa; and it skirts around the mountain towards the east facing the Atlantic Ocean, which is home to Cape Town's mostly affluent and generally white neighbourhoods. And towards the south you'll see the Lion's Head peak overlooking the beautiful exclusive suburbs of Llandudno and Hout Bay. Further south, is the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. Of course, there's water everywhere. Table Bay opens up to the mighty South Atlantic Ocean which can be seen as far as the horizon. Being surrounded by this beautiful natural setting, I just cannot believe that I was really in the middle of a thriving modern city.

Cape of good Hope

Cape Town's city centre reminded me of some areas in Sydney and Auckland. The Victorian terraced buildings, the beaches, the weather and the general ambience echoes some of Sydney's inner suburbs. The centre appears very Western and modern and it has its fair share of skyscrapers that announces to the world that Cape Town is a business city. However, when walking around the Governement, Adderly and Parliament Street one is also reminded that together with Pretoria, Cape Town is an administrative city for the whole of South Africa.

Atop the Table Mountain

But what makes this city different from its southern cousins are the presence of desolate wind-swept squalid slums in the outer suburbs on the Cape Flats mostly populated by black immigrants from other parts of South Africa and even other African countries.Racial apartheid may be gone, but there's still economic apartheid which is more akin to Third World realities. These areas spawn criminal elements which is the bane of South African society. Crime is the favourite topic around dinner tables of South Africa; and Cape Towner's cozy existence is being threatened by this unruly class of lawless men who hold the country at ransom.

Yet Cape Town still show a pretty face. It has lovely well-tended European-style gardens where squirrels cheekily scamper around for nuts. It has unique immaculately white-coated Afrikaner structures with an architecture that's evolved from the city's proud Dutch heritage. It also has grand Victorian-style civic buildings, churches and terrace houses that reflect South Africa's English contribution to the city. The city centre has such a very European appearance that I forgot that I was in Africa. But the lurking backdrop of the Table Mountain and rugged rocky coasts of the Atlantic Ocean overshadow the prettiness of the city. Wilderness still rules over the civilised parts of Cape Town.

Greenmarket Square

Cape Town's African heritage has been mixed with European and Asian influences as a result of its turbulent migration history. The nomadic Khoisan people occupied the area right until the Portuguese first sighted the area who gave it the name "Cape of Good Hope". By the 17th century, the prosperous Dutch East Indian mercantile company (VOC) used the place as a stopover to stock up for their trading route to India and soon discovered that the area would be good as a permanent settlement. The descendants of these Dutch settlers, called Afrikaners, built a fort around the present Botanical Gardens and Cape Town grew into an important town. The Dutch then imported slaves from India, Indonesia , Malaya and Ceylon to provide labourers for the burgeoning town who then intermarried with the Khoisan people, forming a new race called the "Cape coloureds" . The 19th century, the British Empire expanded into South Africa and they clashed with the Afrikaners. Cape Town boomed when gold was discovered and its port became an important port along the European-Asian route. However, when the Suez canal was built, the city's importance waned but its European population kept up with the industrialisation of the city using the coloureds and indigenous labour. Apartheid came and left and yet Cape Town remains as South Africa's legislative city.

The multi-racial faces that you see in wandering around the streets of Cape Town are the result of 350 years of the Cape's fascinating history of invasion, colonialisation, slave labour and industrialisation.

• Pros:Spectacular sceneries
• Cons:Economic disparity and crime
• In a nutshell:Africa at its most pleasant