Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 140

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against its future, full of people from somewhere else, passing through. Nothing
is quite what it appears to be, or exactly where you expect it to be, or doing quite
what it was designed to do. Boundaries shift, plans change. A fallen billboard
gets pressed into service as the wall of someone’s shack; a mountain sits smack in
the city centre; spaceships dock in the harbour. Maybe it’s the wind which muddles
things up: the gusty south-easter, which features annually in a front-page photo
in the Cape Times, lifting some poor citizen’s skirts as she clings to a lamp-post.
Even the roads and bridges seem blown off course, ending up in odd places. Like
scenic Chapman’s Peak Drive, teetering on the very edge of the sea cliffs – every
year raining down boulders, every year hopefully repaired. Or the railway line run-
ning next to the sea at Kalk Bay, where the waves sometimes spatter the train
windows; as you ride you can wave at bare-chested surfers frolicking in the water,
or seals looping their sleek bodies through the surf.
You might notice, in central Cape Town, the flyover arcing overhead. An im-
pressive ramp of concrete, designed to slingshot cars right across the unsightly
harbour-end of the city and on to the cosmopolitan delights of Sea Point. Except
something’s missing. There’s two broken-ended halves of a swooping highway –
and a great big gap of unused sky in between. If you tried to drive it, you’d swan-
dive into the busy intersection below, a long way down.
Consider also the main taxi-rank, which is not on the ground as you might
expect, but up in the sky, on top of the railway station, where once the trains and
platforms were divided into White and Non-white. What used to be an austere
concrete rooftop has been transformed into an African marketplace. Fancy a
snack, a haircut, a pair of cheap sunglasses? Here, this lushly dreadlocked gentle-
man will provide you with obscure medicinal herbs, if you’re feeling queasy; these
tall, smooth-talking guys from up north will sell you knock-off Nigerian videos;
this trio of voluble mamas have brought their bags of ten-cent sweets all the way
from a distant township – for you! These sassy teens in skin-tight jeans will braid
your hair or embellish you with extensions; and over there’s an old man selling
pots and pans – and machetes too, should you feel the need for personal protection.
The taxis congregate here from all over – gunning through the rush-hour
traffic, skidding in and out of the fast lane, stopping at will, packed tight with
bodies, shuddering with the bone-vibrating sounds of township house. Taxi?
Mitchells Plain, Mowbray, Grassy Park? The spry little guy in the baseball cap
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Cape Town
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