e dropped out of the sky at 9.30 pm one balmy winter's evening and stepped down from the plane onto tarmac illuminated under African skies. If any of us had thought to look, we'd have found ourselves eyeballing familiar constellations - Cape Town lies on a similar latitude to Sydney - but it was all any of us could do to keep our chins from knocking our chests. We'd boarded that plane 26 hours previously in Wellington, and after a transit stop in Johannesburg, we'd re-embarked for the last drop-dead leg to Cape Town.
Paying little attention to the taxi ride into town, our total focus was twofold -- ensuring we were on the path of least resistance to our hotel and beds, and that we didn't lose any luggage. Breakwater Lodge is in the heart of Cape Town's Docklands: it sounded novel although a bit pricey when we booked it over the internet from a range of several thousand kilometres, but we knew we'd be dead beat that night. We knew the Breakwater occupied the premises of an old prison, but we hadn't quite thought through the implications. You can convert a prison room into a hotel room, but it retains the essential qualities of a prison cell; in this case, bars on the windows and a distinct lack of elbow room. By the time you've dumped a double bed where once there was only a stretcher and a slops bucket, there's little enough floor space to put the bags, let alone squeeze past them. It would do for the night, when all we wanted to do was sleep. But we had four days in Cape Town awaiting the emergence of the bikes from the usual cat's cradle of customs red tape, and each of us fell asleep firmly resolved to find more commodious digs in the morning.
We woke the next morning, extruded ourselves past our bags to the window and flung the curtains wide to be confronted with a view of . nothing, apart from the wall of the none-too-prepossessing cell block across the way. That just about did it, especially once we got out and about in the Docklands and were treated to the vistas that the Breakwater was uniquely positioned to ignore - the town nestled about Table Bay, presided over by the iconic silhouette of Table Mountain and with a view of Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 18 years.
Paul had arrived a couple of days before the rest of us, and found a place just around the corner from the Breakwater boasting both space and a ravishing panoramic outlook, not to mention secure parking for the bikes once we'd extricated them from bureaucratic limbo. That, we decided, would do nicely. We wasted little time in relocating to a spacious three-bedroom suite where the five of us - Gareth, Jo, Floyd, Dave, and Paul: Brendan and Tony had yet to arrive - could spread our gear, and then set out to see the sights of Cape Town. Better still, the whole suite was cheaper than just one of the prison cells, and it was good to be around the others.
On these motorcycle trips of ours, Gareth needs a theme, some kind of theoretical purpose for the venture. When planning our tour of North America, he was able to find a thematic link with our earlier Silk Road adventure, which had followed the great trade route Marco Polo had pioneered from Europe to China. Christopher Columbus was seeking an alternative sea route to his hero Marco's Silk Road when the Americas got in his way. We began our American trip where Columbus collided with the Bahamas. Reading about the history of Africa, and South Africa in particular, we found another common thread tying Africa to both. Just five years before Columbus' discovery of the New World, the navigator Bartholomeu Dias in 1487/88, sailing under the Portuguese flag in direct competition to Columbus' sponsors, the Spanish, ran down the African coast far beyond the limits of European ken until he came to the point where the coastline turned the corner. He sailed far enough around to determine that the cape did, indeed, represent the southern tip of Africa. Knowing he had scored a coup for king and country, Dias wasted little time in hightailing it back to the warmer climes of Portugal to report his finding and to claim the reward he could surely expect. He named his discovery the Cape of Storms, for reasons which his journals made abundantly clear. Thus Dias laid the foundation for fellow Portuguese Vasco da Gama 10 years later in 1498, just six years after Columbus' collision with the Americas, to forge a sea link east from Europe to Marco Polo's Eastern spicery. And for us the efforts of Marco Polo, Columbus and da Gama were the historic feats of discovery that our Silk Riders, Backblocks America and Under African Skies roadtrips paid homage to. After Africa, we would have one ride left to complete our tribute to these heroes of Europe's globalisation - we have yet to ride South America fully, which Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, sailing under the Spanish flag, and out to complete the job Columbus had failed to, rounded in 1520 en route to Marco's Spice Islands.
The first attempt at permanent European settlement in South Africa was right here in Cape Town's Docklands, where the Dutch East India Company established a station in 1652 to restock their vessels plying between the Netherlands and its Southeast Asian colonies across the Indian Ocean. As we walked around the electric fence-enclosed housing of the Europeans and counted the number of security firm signs swinging on the razor wire toppings of high walls that conceal the houses of the frightened, we wondered whether Europeans had ever felt safe here.
It wasn't until the seventeenth century that anything serious in the way of settlement of the interior began, with the Dutch making their way to an eventual encounter with the locals along the course of the Fish River, in modern-day Namibia - a destination for us only a few days up the road. These black-skinned people were the Xhosa, the southernmost of several Bantuspeaking tribes of Africans who had progressively migrated southward down the African continent over the course of centuries, the technological edge they possessed - the ability to smelt iron - enabling them to kick the butt of the hunter-gatherer peoples already in residence. What a contrast to the migrants flocking to Cape Town from other parts of the continent today. These are mainly economic and political refugees from devastated lands to the north looking for opportunities that just don't exist where they've come from: hardly sweeping all before them as in the tradition of their Xhosa forebears.
It was inevitable, as both the Dutch settlers and the Xhosa herders coveted the same tracts of land across the south of the continent, that conflict would ensue throughout the next 200 years. And so it did, in the shape of the socalled Cape Frontier wars.
Another connection between our American ride and this latest African expedition was slavery. We'd been where the first African slaves were landed in America by a Dutch trader at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. We'd stood in the slave trading market in St Augustine, Florida, and we'd paid homage in the cotton plantations of Alabama and Louisiana to the efforts of African Americans to secure their freedom. We'd also visited the home of Martin Luther King who had finally secured those rights in the 1960s. We knew that soon, as we rode up Africa, we would be riding through territories from which whole generations of men, women and children had been kidnapped and shipped off to the colonies of the Americas, to be the labour upon which much of the wealth of Europe and the United States was created. To be in the homeland of the American slave seemed to us a natural step in our own voyage of discovery of how the West was won.
What we didn't appreciate was that colonial South Africa itself has a legacy of importing its own slaves who have provided the ethnic diversity that it celebrates today when it calls itself the 'Rainbow Nation'. The Dutch East India Company sent slaves from its territories in Indonesia, India and Madagascar to work for Dutch masters in the Cape area, and it also used its foothold at the toe of Africa as a dumping-ground for political misfits and malcontents. These people were collectively called 'Cape Malays' and, once intermarried with the white Dutch, 'Cape Coloureds'. As many as half the population of modern South Africa claims descent from this pool.
Gareth reminded us of the historical context of this leg of our journey as the five of us spent our first couple of days on African soil killing time waiting for the bikes to be released, playing tourist in Cape Town and getting the vibe. It was a foretaste for Paul of the educational side of the experience that lay ahead. Jo and Floyd, of course, and Dave to a lesser extent, had been putting up with lectures like these for the better part of a lifetime.
We wandered about the Docklands area of Cape Town, lined with swanky restaurants and bars and forming exactly the kind of precinct for the pampered that Auckland's Viaduct aspires to be, and which irresistibly invites comparison with San Francisco's waterfront - especially as Robben Island sits out in Table Bay as a stand-in for San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz. It was a pleasant place to hang out. We found prices to be pretty similar to those in New Zealand, and the quality of the food and produce to be quite acceptable. People spotted us for foreigners from our accents, and were very friendly and willing to chat, which was at odds with the very high level of security evident in both the shopping and residential areas.
As we passed...
