Cape Town - The City Sightseeing topless red double-decker buses are one of the best ways to see a lot of Cape Town in a relatively short time. But what you might not know is that the company offers many other services, including chopper flights, water taxis and sidecar trips.
The newest addition is the LaGuGu township tour, that was launched last month and departs from the new head office in Long Street. But instead of a big bus, your mode of transport is a typical township-style minibus taxi. Painted bright red, of course. To get you into the spirit, the driver will pull up while hooting madly and the guide will hang out the window, shouting the destination.
During the drive to Langa, the guide – ours was the lovely Ayanda Bavuma – will give you a history lesson about the township and some of the places you will visit.
You have some options. As with the other tours, you can hop on and off at the various destinations on the route through Langa and Gugulethu, you can do it on foot (with a guide), or you can cycle. As part of the media launch group, we all opted to walk.
The poor guides. They are from the townships so they know everything there is to know, as well as many residents, and have personal anecdotes to share, so it makes them experts at their jobs and creates employment. But keeping a horde of journalists, bloggers and photographers together proved to be harder than herding cats. The walk should have taken about an hour – it took nearly three.
Besides monuments of the apartheid era, like the Dompas Office, Freedom (Sobukwe) Square, and the Gugulethu Seven and Amy Biehl memorials, we also visited the childhood home of Brenda Fassie, where Bavuma and senior tour guide Mike Zuma (no relation) gave us a rousing rendition of her hit song, Weekend Special, while her brother – who still lives there – looked on.
We were shown the contrasts of township housing, from formal to informal. In Joe Slovo we drank umqombothi (home-brewed beer) in a shack, and elsewhere we stopped on the side of the road where braver members of the party ate a “smiley” (some people are a bit squeamish about this, preferring not to confront their food before eating it). If you’re not familiar with township life, that’s a sheep’s head.
They sit all woolly and bloody in rows on tables before being cooked on open fires. It’s a long process, but a half will set you back R25, and has enough meat for a decent meal. The eyeball is a delicacy and the cheeks are delicious.
We encountered smartly dressed gents in suits, smoking joints; a serious little boy, who wordlessly and firmly did the three-move handshake with everyone; a group of children chanting: “Money! Money!”; and a sangoma who brandished his ishoba (fly whisk made from wildebeest or cow tail) and bestowed blessings.
The last stop of the tour was Mzoli’s, where it is always noisy and vibey on a weekend. Our food had been pre-ordered (you usually choose your meat in the butchery, which is then sent to the braai at the back), so platters of chops, wors and chicken were plonked down in front of us, and big bowls of pap en sous. If you arrive without suitable beverage, there are plenty of shebeens where a Black Label quart is R15.
The LaGuGu tour costs R290 for adults, R150 for children aged five to 17, under-fives ride free. It departs every half-an-hour from 9am until 3pm daily. For more information call 021 511 6000, go to www.citysightseeing.co.za or visit the office at 81 Long Street. There is another office outside the V&A Waterfront Two Oceans Aquarium. Both are open 9am to 5pm.
Weekend Argus