words from the world

A 10-hour flight to leap from an hemisphere to the other. I fall asleep in London and I wake up in the Nelson Mandela's country. As the plane goes up to the airstrip, a stack of corrugated iron and twisted wood shape a makeshift city. Shanty towns stretch out over hectares and reflect the image of a sad reality ; the stakes of a country who, clearing away the evil spirit of Apartheid must bustle about filling the disparities between two universes – the opulence one and the need one – who justapose without looking at each other nor confront one another.
The recent events causing the flight of herds of Zimbabwean immigrants don't put my mind at rest while I put the foot down on the African ground. I disembark in a small airport – Welcome to Cape Town. I load my bag, take some information from the tourist office before hopping on a collective taxi that drops me off by the guesthouse where I have an appointment with my brother and his friend Ronan.
We hire an Opel Corsa that will acompagny us throughout our African odyssey. And our first outing has a still mythic name for generations of navigators and explorers : the cape of good hope. Vasco de Gama was the first one to open the maritime way to the Indian subcontinent skirting around Africa and, not far from the rocky promontory, a cruce has been erected in tribute to the great navigator he was. Along the road, small seaports brighten up the ride. Winds and bad weather are the everyday life of the intrepid sailors who lives here.




Our road stops at the end of the peninsula. Welcome to Cape point, a jagged lighthouse-topped hillock. A cable-car saves the laziest people walking uphill. Beyond the luminous marker, millions of cubic meters of water separate us from Antartica, the white continent.
On the right side, about one hundred meter away from Cape point, the foam runs aground the cape of good hope. And for the sailors, the ending sign of heading south. Bear to port! Still a few miles and the sailing northwards the African continent will be started. The cap of good hope is not the southernmost point of Africa since it was supplanted by the Agulhas cape but it's far more representative in the change of heading that the boat took and keep on taking.
The wind pulls our last remaining hair out but the view of the breathtaking cliffs of Cape point is worth struggling few minutes against Eole.








On the way back, we make a short break at Boulders beach where few families of penguins settled. Uneasy to near them. So we sit down and delight in these moments.






In the evening, we chat with Zimbabweans, Congolese and South-africans who, despite the political tension in their respective countries share a certain joie de vivre. The first day of my round-the-world trip ends, far from the apprehension I had this morning as I arrived... A day which starts a 2-month African adventure between deserts, safaris, meetings and a laidback way of life only Africa can offer.