Day 59: Visiting Cape Fur Seal Heaven on Hout Bay with Tim Smith
[Note: Network is slow at our Cape Town house so we’re publishing without pics just to get the posts up. We’ll come back to them and add images.]
Today was built around another blind friend date, this one a setup by longtime Sullivan family priest Father Leo O’Donovan, former president of Georgetown University: Tim Smith, a Cape Town-based director of the Jesuit Refugee Service. Tim showed us Hout Bay and the unreal seal situation on Duiker Island.
Tim is a South African whose life’s work has been in NGOs. He travels regularly to refugee camps in several countries in southern Africa, overseeing the administrative work required to run education and medical operations in each one.
He lives in Hout Bay, which is about 6 miles south of our place.
The drive there felt like we were living the b-roll of “Searching for Sugarman.”
Stunning cliffside roads weaving in and out of the huge coastal aqua swells below.
Hout Bay is rustic and lovely. We ate fish and chips near the fish market and then frollicked a little on the public beach.
There was an encounter with a local guy and a wild gi-normous cape fur seal on the dock. He was there feeding “Mr. Brown” fish guts, looking for tips from snap-happy tourists.
I know I know it’s icky but we got a pic anyway. Mr. Brown was chill.
I went in to a shop selling old junk and treasures from long-gone ships and even shipwrecks — ashtrays, buoys, lighters, maps, models, signage, cutlery, etc. There are countless shipwrecks along this coast.
Teddy said he expected me to emerge with an Ikea-sized blue bag full of stuff, but I somehow walked out empty-handed.
At around 2 pm we got on a charter boat with some other tourists and headed across the “mild” summer swells toward Duiker Island — not really an island but a bunch of rocks in the sea where seals hang.
The ocean round these parts in winter sees 30-40 foot waves, and surfers come from around the world to cruise its “never-ending” waves.” We were on the tiny summer surf and it was terrifying, so no thank you.
You can smell the seals before you see them. But that’s ok. Our boat eventually pulled right up on their giant rock hangout, and honestly we could have stayed there all day watching these mostly (all?) male Cape Fur Seals lounge, sunbathe, bark, dive, swirl, chatter, snooze…
If you see animals in the wild, they’re usually just surviving, looking for the next meal, on to the next thing, hiding, scurrying away….not the case here. I can’t remember ever seeing any other animal who was just straight up hanging out with hundreds of his buddies, nowhere to be, nothin to do but chill, swim, flip around for some tourists, snooze….maybe catch a fish or two.
It was so human. We were enchanted and enthralled.
Then we road back to the harbour along the coast, and drove back to Cape Town in Teddy’s increasingly confident left-side-of-the-road hands.
Amazingly we did school in the afternoon and both kids did great. Reward was dinner at Cafe Paradiso on Kloof — a place we’ve now been to 3 times. The restaurant gives parent patrons a break by inviting kids to a back-room kitchen to cook pizzas and/or cookies while parents relax together for a drink/dinner. For a kid to be swept away for 30 minutes, cook their own dinner and eat it — costs about $4/child. Cheapest childcare ever.
