Robben Island

A bit behind on my blogs here, but no worries! I'll try to catch up before I switch countries again. :)

I got the overnight bus from Swakop to Cape Town and arrived with no hassle.

My first day here I decided to visit Robben Island, the prison where the apartheid resisters (including Nelson Mandela) were held. I foolishly thought I could just buy a ferry ticket and go, went at 11 and had to settle for a 1pm ticket. I also thought that gave me time to get to the hostel and have lunch first. As a result, I was sprinting across town (didn't see any combis or taxis along the way) to make it in time. There were only 2 people still boarding when I hit the security check and they didn't even give me time to collect my stuff after; they just dumped it into my hands because the ferry was ready to go without me.

The tour was nice, but not enough time for exploring. The bus tour took most of the time and was saved from being boring by the AWESOME guide we had. He asked about the nationalities of everyone on the bus and wove the contributions of each country into the history of South Africa or the fight against apartheid. This guy was good. Then we got to go inside with a former inmate who it seemed, didn't really want to talk about it. He asked for questions, but we didn't know what to ask and his answers were too short to really help us understand anything about life there. Afterward there was about 10 minutes for people to visit the gift shop before the ferry back. I snuck away and saw some really fascinating displays they had hidden down the hall and hadn't told anyone about! Artifacts and photos with their stories and explanations... great stuff and underutilized to boot. The gift shop irritated me too. It was such crass commercialism. I mean, it was an island of political prisoners being held for fighting injustice. It was awful. People died there. And to go from trying to think about that to a shop with Mandela shirts and mugs and keychains and commemorative EVERYTHING killed any reflection you might have on what you'd seen. It's a shame because it seems like they could do so much with this, but perhaps history needs more time before it can really be explained.