{"id":573899075,"date":"2026-06-04T20:03:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T00:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573899075"},"modified":"2026-07-09T19:41:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T23:41:21","slug":"taking-a-road-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2026\/06\/04\/taking-a-road-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking a road trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is looking like another three-post day. We covered a lot of ground on our day’s adventures, simply too much to digest all at once. So here’s the first segment. <\/p>\n

A little shuttle bus picked us up at the hotel this morning and made a bunch of stops. They were all fine and fun and charming and some of them were quite lovely on their own. Taken as a whole, however, they seemed to be taking away from the main feature of the day. But you don’t know that until you know that. Anyway, a few of the things we saw early in the day. <\/p>\n

Our first stop was at Bo-Kaap, in Cape Town. This is the old Malay Quarter, formerly racially segregated. It is, today, a multicultural neighborhood, noted for hits brightly colored homes and cobblestone streets, where some 57 percent of the residents are Muslim. It is being gentrified, which is changing the character of the place, but it still maintains the largest concentration of pre-1850 architecture in South Africa. <\/p>\n

In 1760 a man started buying up the land in this area and built small homes on it that he leased to his slaves. The indigenous peoples resisted the Dutch, so they brought in Malaysians, Indonesians, and other parts of the continent, which is how it got its nickname. Into the 19th century, more housing was thrown up for a growing population of tradesmen, craftsmen, and artisans. Political exiles moved in. At sometime after emancipation, the story goes, the bright paints were put on the walls as a proud expression of freedom. (There seems to be some debate about this part of the story.) <\/p>\n

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Apartheid forced some people and communities out of the quarter, which also shrank the footprint. In the 1940s some preservation began, with 15 houses restored, and in 1966 part of Bo-Kaap was designated as a National Monument and a few dozen more houses and streets were restored. <\/p>\n

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Over-tourism is surely a problem here. We were there for about 15 minutes and you could get a sense of that. <\/p>\n

These are the Twelve Apostles, part of the Table Mountain complex overlooking Camps Bay in Cape Town. The mountain range stretches almost four miles, but there are actually 18 peaks, averaging about about 2,460 feet. Also, right here on this bay, on this beautiful sunny day, was just about the windest wind I have ever experienced not in a storm. <\/p>\n

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I recorded a video, but you can hear nothing I said. Everyone was taking the photos of leaning into the wind in one direction and then turning around and sitting on the wind in the other direction. I found one weather site which told me we had gusts of 40 miles per hour, but that’s well under what we felt. <\/p>\n

Anyway, this was a beautiful area, and our guide just dropped us in and out rather quickly because, despite views like this … <\/p>\n

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We were just getting warmed up. Also, we went a little inland to warm up, and get out of the wind. There’s a little shopping village there, where we spent about 20 minutes, which was just long enough for you to fantasy about the real estate ads in the windows of the realtor’s office. Looked lovely. Great bakery nearby. A coffeeshop where you can get a free cuppa if you ride up on your horse. Quite little merchants and shops. All whitewashed and quaint. <\/p>\n

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I need a swing wall now, clearly. With a custom-designed tree painting above it. Where do I go to order such a thing? Also, technically, our new custom designed swings should swing. <\/p>\n

Anyway. We also made a quick stop to make some friends with some ostriches. Ostriches are here. <\/p>\n

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They’re also an important part of the cuisine here. We didn’t tell the ostriches that. <\/p>\n

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We also didn’t tell the precocious child who is on this tour, who is dominating, hilarious, the conversation with our guide. He could scarcely do his job for entertaining Lilly. I think her mom was pleased to have the attention go somewhere else for the part of a day. <\/p>\n

Anyway, I have some other ostrich photos and they will wind up as banners here one day. Silly little inquisitive birds. <\/p>\n

For the next part of our day, we’ll be exploring the Cape of Good Hope!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is looking like another three-post day. We covered a lot of ground on our day’s adventures, simply too much to digest all at once. So here’s the first segment. A little shuttle bus picked us up at the hotel this morning and made a bunch of stops. They were all fine and fun and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,32,10,116,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573899075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-history","category-photo","category-south-africa","category-thursday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573899075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573899076,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899075\/revisions\/573899076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573899075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573899075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573899075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}