Cartagena

Looking to go to Cartagena, Colombia? I have been going there since I was a kid and I highly recommend this article by Maureen Orth, a respected Vanity Fair correspondent who wrote this piece for Town&Country Travel magazine. She’s lived in Colombia and has visited it many times over the last four decades. She knows what she is talking about.

Let me know if you have further questions about Cartagena. I will be going there at the end of the month.

Chicago

A look at the Chicago skyline on November 3, 2008, the day before the US elections. The green area at the bottom of the photo is Grant Park, where Senator Barack Obama wants to celebrate if he wins on November 4. I had not been in Chicago for years but the city looks good! I feel like coming back for a long weekend or something like that.

I remember vividly Chicago was a very cold and windy city and that we stayed at a filthy, cheap motel downtown. I have come back here a few times but I always leave thinking I need to come back for pleasure. This time around I am staying at the Hard Rock Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The weather is nice and cool and I can see the Sears Tower from my room. I think Chicago is ready to welcome a new president on Tuesday.

In case you are interested in my 2008 campaign dispatches, you can find them in Terra.com, in my blog and in Twitter.

Next week I will be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the Nieman Foundation 70th reunion. This is the first time I return to Cambridge since attending Harvard during the 2007-08 academic year. Look forward to catching up with my fellow Nieman fellows.

Me Jana, 2300 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 2220. Lebanese food. I really liked it. It’s better than Lebanese Taver in Woodley Park.

The Heights, 1423 P St. NW Washington, DC 2005. American food. Alright for a quick bite. Convenient if you live on 16th St.

Sawatdee, Court Plaza 2250 Clarendon Blvd. Arlington, VA 22201. Thai food. Pretty good if you are in Courthouse or go to the movies there.

Afternoon scene of the Cape of Good Hope, taken from Cape Point, South Africa.

Sunset at Good Hope Nature Reserve, in southwest South Africa.

Cape Point, as seen from the Lighthouse.

Today’s destination: Cape Point, the second most southern tip in Africa. Attraction: breathtaking views of the meeting point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

If you come to Cape Town, a day trip to Cape Point is a must. Driving a rental car, I started in Kalk Bay, a small village on the eastern coast of the Cape. Within minutes I arrived to Fish Hoek (fishing village and dry town) and continued on to Simon’s Town, the largest in the area and home to the South African Naval Base. Simon’s Town is a quaint attraction for tourists, offering good restaurants, nice shops and water activities (white shark cage diving, and whale and seal watching).

I then skipped a Penguin Colony popular among tourists and headed to the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. The entrance costs 55 Rand per adult. A joyous drive, I must have stopped 20 times to take pictures and enjoy the mountainous views of False Bay on this weirdly sunny, cloudless and misty day. I saw baboons and ostriches on the way, as if I had not seen enough of them in Botswana, and finally made it to the Cape Point Lighthouse.

Get this: while in Cape Point I ran into Lorena, a Spaniard I had met two weeks in Victoria Falls. She is here with her husband on a honeymoon…

The Lighthouse is at the top of a dangerous but spectacular cliff, offering stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean. This is where Portuguese explorer Bartolome Dias arrived in 1488, thinking this was the Southern most point of Africa. I would have thought the same thing. When you are standing at the Lighthouse, all you see is stormy water all the way to the end of earth. I first experienced a similar view in 2003 in Cabo Finisterra (Galicia, in northwestern Spain), which literally means the end of land. A sense of inspiration and power overtook me standing atop these cliffs. If I had to rate the two, I would probably vote for Cape Point as the most striking.

After wondering around Cape Point I drove a few miles to the Cape of Good Hope (Cabo da Boa Esperança in Portuguese), where a “the most southern-western point in Africa” sign welcomes you. Don’t be tricked. The southern most point of Africa is Cape Agulhas, about 150 kilometers to the southeast.

On my return to Cape Town, I drove along the western side of the Cape, my eyes clashing against a gorgeously looking hazy sunset in Kommetjie and Hout Bay, a drive comparable to that of Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Barbara and San Francisco.

It’s a pity I was not able to drive through Chapman’s Peak, closed this week due to the shooting of a film about renowned American pilot Amelia Earhart, starting Hillary Swank and Richard Gere. Want some gossip? I already knew Gere was in town. My brother ran into him in an elevator at the Mount Nelson Hotel earlier in the week.

Cape Town's Table Mountain, as I returned from Robben Island on a sunny winter afternoon.

Cape Town – I am in Cape Town, South Africa!

As you know, I love visiting exciting destinations for the first time. In the five days I have been here, I have found it a thrill. If you know nothing about South Africa, Johannesburg is the business centre, the large unattractive city, while Cape Town is the country’s beach town par excellence, South Africa’s San Francisco, the place where you spend your summer hiking, drinking wine or strolling along the waterfront.

“When I first came here, I thought I had found paradise,” a friend of mine tells me, before explaining how racial issues and its distant location from the United States and Europe made him realize paradise did have its limitations. This just to say I know my first upbeat impressions are probably spoiled by the virgin eye of a Latin tourist in search of some fun.

In the first few days here, I have found many similarities between Cape Town and other coastal cities I have visited or lived in. San Francisco, Malibu, Big Sur (all in California), the French Mediterranean and Rio de Janeiro first come to mind – in essence because of their beaches, mild weather, beautiful scenery, large ocean waves, high mountains and posh vacation spots. I stopped making comparisons. I am going to start comparing the others to Cape Town. For starters, none of the above places sit so elegantly at the tip of the world (‘top’ if you look at the map upside down) between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. And, how do you factor Cape Town’s unique ethnic and racial history?

Since arriving here, I have visited some of the most obvious tourist destinations:

Table Mountain: this is the flat mountain overlooking the city for which Cape Town is best known for. The funicular (they call it ‘cableway’ here) takes you up to 1086 meters in five minutes (at a cost of 130 Rand). The view from there is astonishing although it was cloudy when we visited it. I am thinking about going to back to take better pictures and take a longer walk.

Robben Island & Nelson Mandela Gateway: the island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of the 27 years he was behind bars during Apartheid. I took a 30-minute ferry ride (150 Rand) from the Victoria & Albert Waterfront to the Island. It was a beautiful day and I took a few nice pictures of Table Mountain from the boat. A former Robben Island prisoner gave me a tour of the prison, including a peek at Mandela’s cell. It was an interesting and worthwhile visit but I did not like that the prison has been fully remodeled, looking too sharp painting a much humane and sellable picture of Robben Island than what the history books hold.

Victoria & Albert Waterfront: known as the Waterfront, it’s full of restaurants, shops and hotels and serves as the departure site for various water activities. Some of the more expensive African craft shops I visited include Delagoa, Porcupine and African Trading Port.

Cape Town – I spent a wonderful Saturday afternoon with two of my former Nieman fellows (2008), Melanie Gosling, who lives here, and Andrew Quinn, who is spending the (northern) summer reporting a series of stories about vaccines research in South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya. This was my first Nieman reunion since leaving Harvard in July, a nice gathering I did not expect would happen so soon! We spent most of the afternoon catching up and climbing the Echo Valley Mountain in Kalk Bay, 33 kilometers southeast of Cape Town, a stunning spot from where we watched a couple of whales wonder around False Bay — the huge bay east of Cape Town.