Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 141

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Cape Town
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who’s shouting at us now is the gaardjie, the taxi door-operator, money-collector,
customer-wrangler, seat-packer and general driver’s sidekick. Shall we grab a
ride? Which taxi should we pick – “Mister Lover Man”, “Funky Titanic”, “Rock of
Ages”? Jam in, jam in where you can, slide your grubby five-rand coins over to the
gaardjie, let’s move! We still have a few more sights to see ...
Seeing as this is billed as a safari, no doubt you will not be satisfied with
your African Experience if we don’t spot a few real live animals. But nothing as ob-
vious, as mundane as rhino or cheetah. Roaring along the highway, face smeared
against the glass of a speeding taxi, you can’t help but note one of Cape Town’s
most delightful oddities. Even lifelong Capetonians shake their heads every now
and then in disbelief at this pastoral scene. What are those creatures, gambolling
on the grassy slope? Zebras? Not quite ... those are quaggas, fantastic experi-
mental beasts from the past. They’re hybrids, the products of a breeding project
to recreate an extinct sub-species. In spitting distance of rush-hour traffic, they
browse and twitch their pale rumps, coyly naked where one would expect conven-
tional zebra stripes.
Less exotic, but to my mind more fully citizens of the city, are the birds:
those specialists of antigravity and upside-down worlds, those connoisseurs of
sudden reversals of wind. They thrive here. We have immigrant birds, refugees
from up north, like the hadedas with their mad mocking haa-haaah cry; or the
sweetly pair-bonded Egyptian geese that are everywhere now – in the forest, on
the beach, on top of five-storey buildings, balancing their plump bodies on the
tips of lamp-posts all over town. Like any city, we also have our disreputable street
pigeons, scrapping on street-corners; as well as flocks of more elegant racing
birds, circling above the old Malay quarter, with its bright little houses from an-
other century. All mixed up, of course, with the raucous gulls, blown in from the
bay like sailors on shore leave. And every now and then, high, high off the corner
of Table Mountain, you’ll spot the twin dots of a pair of black eagles, way up there.
Which brings us back, inevitably, to the mountain: the glorious tyrant of our sky-
line. All stories about Cape Town begin and end here, it seems. So too our tour.
So wave goodbye to the taxi-driver, check your possessions, and count up
your souvenirs: a flake of rust from a tanker in the bay; a bedraggled gull feather;
a twist of quagga hair; a fallen number-plate from a speeding taxi. Jumbled to-
gether, they don’t look like much, and they probably won’t get through security