Cape Town: A table with a view

Remember The Gods Must Be Crazy? Set in Botswana and South Africa, the film tells the story of Xi, a bushman of the Kalahari Desert, whose band has no knowledge of the world beyond, and how a Coca-Cola bottle turns their world upside down.

Determined to throw the bottle off the ‘end of the world’, Xi finds himself at the top of a cliff with a layer of low-lying clouds obscuring the landscape below. This convinces him that he has reached the edge of the world, and he throws the bottle off the cliff. This scene was filmed at God’s Window in the then Eastern Transvaal, South Africa (now Mpumalanga).

Mountain in Cape Town
Standing atop Table Mountain in Cape Town, I had a similar ‘edge of the world’ feeling surrounded as I was by fog.
The plateau at the mountain top is about three kilometres wide, edged by impressive cliffs. Our guide had warned us about the fog, and sure enough it thickened as we reached the top. But for me it made the view even better — in the distance I could see aquamarine water glittering in the sunlight, white foam licking the shore, while the fog swirled round the cliff edges where I stood.

A colour-coded city
The top was like a small village square with curio shops a coffee centre with a roaring electric fire. Down below, Cape Town itself was quaint, without skyscrapers, and so well organised as to appear colour-coded. The area around the Table Bay hotel where we were staying had houses with blue roofs, while the centre of the city looked as if strawberries, lemons, blackcurrants, guavas, oranges and apples were arranged in neat little rows. Another part of the city had brown and brick-coloured roofs.

South African cuisine is heavily meat-based, but I need not have worried about being a vegetarian. The country’s hospitality industry caters to people with varied food habits. There are a number of Indian restaurants, and I found even some South African ones offering Jain food. Cape Town sure knows how to set a tabletop.