Day 108: Mandela Capture Site — Bunny Chow
AAwoke to another gray, rainy day. For a place known as the San Diego of South Africa, this was not the weather we’d been promised!! That’s ok. If it were our one week of vacation from work we’d have been devastated but, given our 2019, we didn’t bat an eye. We had things to do.
Starting with school. Willa and I camped out at the Lighthouse Bar, where she did her reading, a bunch of math and continued work on a book she’s writing about five superhero girls. More to come on that.
Last night the rain was INSANE. Our hotel room is right on the Indian Ocean and the waves were pounding relentlessly. That combined with driving rain and howling wind made me wonder: What’s stopping the terrifying Indian Ocean from just consuming us whole tonight?? All those poor container ships we could see out there were rocking dramatically, even from a distance. Ugh. Was grateful to be on land.
Around noon we got in the rental car and drove to the Midlands, an area of the KwaZulu Natal aka KZN province about an hour and a half from Durban. Our destination: The Nelson Mandela Capture Site.
On Aug 5, 1962, after 17 months hiding underground, Mandela was pulled over by cops on a random farm country road in KZN and arrested. He spent the next 27 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.
The Capture Site marks the area where he was caught. There’s a free little museum and then this extraordinary sculpture.
It was erected at the capture site 50 years after his arrest. As you walk toward the installation — down a long path symbolizing his long walk to freedom — its upright jagged steel rods meld together, appearing to bring into focus an optical illusion of Mandela’s face.
It’s so cool. And so moving. Might have stayed longer if it hadn’t been for our antsy nerds.
Highly recommend for anyone who plans to visit the area.
We got right back in the car and drove all the way back home. Kids slept thank god and we listened to a bunch of The Dailys. We hate Kirstjen Nielson even more and now know what Carlos Ghosn did!
When we got back to town we picked up our wash n’ fold (church choir aaaaaaah) and headed to Cumin Cafe for an overdue food moment: trying our first Bunny Chow!!
Ok, so Bunny Chow is a Durban-ization of Indian food. Durban is the largest ‘Indian’ city outside of India thanks to a large population of migrants from colonial India who came over during the late 19th-century through early 20th-century.
There are a lot of different ideas about where Bunny Chow came from but basically it’s a working man’s carry-out container of curry. The container isn’t plastic though — it’s a hollowed out loaf of white bread. So you sop up the curry with the big chunk of bread scooped out from the center.
It’s delicious. While we were there we ordered some mild chicken curry and roti and the kids — James!! — loved it. He even said, “I have to say, this is one of my favorite foods we’ve tried.” WHAT??
Another memorable moment from that meal: We played a family game of cards (our version of Blackjack aka 21 or Bust) and the owner of the restaurant came over and said how nice it was to see families “still do this” in the age of iPads. We admitted we do plenty of screen time but it was nice to hear!
We probably would have called it a night but James wasn’t going to let us forget that he’d won a milkshake from a scratch-off ticket at the hotel, so we returned once again to the Lighthouse Bar for a strawberry milkshake. I got the signature hotel cocktail — an Umhlanga Shling — but it was so sweet I couldn’t drink it.
Put the kids down — we’re reading them book 1 of “Toys Go Out” — and packed up for our departure in the morning.
