Foreign Feat

Taking a foreigner to Cape Town is an interesting phenomenon. And when I say foreigner, I mean from Joburg. In this case, my boyfriend. Let’s call him The Wine Merchant. Being a born and bred Capetonian, not only am I proud to the point of being highly annoying, but I am the ultimate tour guide.

That is, of course, if you actually want to have a tour. Yet again, I had got the Wine Merchant out of bed before sunrise. Today we were going up Table Mountain. But not in the cable car – we were going to walk up the thing. I had the backpacks, water, camera, caps, binoculars and the dog. As we drove in the direction of Constantia Nek, he started to get suspicious:

“Where’s the cart thingy?”
“It’s a car and we’ll get there.”
“When?”
“In about five to five and half hours.”

He was, to say the least, slightly upset. An hour into the 45 degree angle hike up the jeep track, he explained to me that to him a holiday was sleeping late, relaxing, reading books and sightseeing. At the moment, he said, he was seeing spots, was surviving on five and half hours of sleep a day and the only thing he had read were plaques on walls remembering dead guys.

Calming him down with promises of deluxe sandwiches and fat coke and the feeling of accomplishment and achievement when we got to the top, I managed to get him to continue. Two hours later, I realised we were lost. Distracting him with sandwiches, I found a Chinese couple who were walking from the direction I thought we should be going in. Using sign language I explained to them that we needed to get to the cable car. Trying to act out a cable car with a dog, a backpack and a camera was not an easy task. Turning around, I found The Wine Merchant standing behind me.
“Are we so lost that we’re now in China?”

Five hours later and we were out of food, water, cellphone battery and humour. I was beginning to understand the real reason behind the name of the trail – “Skeleton Gorge”.

Mid screaming match (which incidentally is incredibly satisfying at 1086 m above sea level) we saw people. Actual moving people. Pinching the Wine Merchant to make sure it was real, we started running and found we were only an hour and 45 minutes from the cable car. I fell into the arms of a German woman and uttered one of the only German phrases I know: “Ich liebe dich” (which I thought was appropriate). The Wine Merchant tried the same, but since she was fairly attractive, I put a stop to that with my other German word “Nein”. This amazing tourist shared her lunch with us and brought tears to my eyes when she gave her sandwich to the dog. I tried to pretend it wasn’t ours to get the extra sandwich, but the Wine Merchant suddenly decided to play the part of the traitor in our relationship.

Three hours later, fairly smelly, dirty and feeling distinctly like mountain people, we were on the cable car, overlooking my beautiful city and feeling like we had just conquered Everest. The Wine Merchant put his arm around me, looked into my eyes, smiled and said: “If you wake me before 12 tomorrow, I’m marrying the German.”

Story by Baglett

Who is Baglett?
She’s a 20-something girl who doesn’t take life too seriously. Read her blog at www.baglett.blogspot.com.

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