A day in my life:
4.45 am: get woken up because someone left the alarm function working on the clock radio in the EXtreme hotel Cape Town room with a tiny window with a view of Table Mountain
8 am: get re-woken up
9.30 am: arrive at Robben Island Nelson Mandela Gateway. Look at bucket that served as a toilet for prisoners up to the 1970s.
10 am: Take a boat to Robben Island called Whale Watcher
10.10-10.11 am: Watch a whale
10.45 am: Arrive at Robben Island amidst a powerful stink of bird shit from the cormorants' colony at the harbour entrance
10.50 am: Get introduced to the President of Singapore
10.55 am: Get interviewed on Singaporean TV about toilets
11 am - 1 pm: Tour Robben Island. Lose the tour because am looking at the toilets where in the words of Trevor “so much of Mr. Mandela's shit went down.”
1.15 pm: Ask a boat crew person about the toilet arrangements (flush; bleach;discharge into the ocean).
2.15 pm: Arrive back at Nelson Mandela Gateway to be greeted by Shoni, a senior manager at Robben Island, who gives Trevor a fancy box from the President of Singapore. Nothing for me. I claim discrimination.
4 pm: Board a plane to Johannesburg which is supposed to be Kulula but is actually confusingly British Airways (BA owns Kulula).
4.10 - 6pm: Converse with an Israeli persimmon farmer who is in South Africa to look at South African persimmon farming, about toilets, persimmon, bus bombings, the holocaust, how many of his family were murdered (most), why some fields in South Africa are round and some are square (don't know); etc.
7pm: Arrive at Trevor's house. Switch on phone to get SMS from mother, responding to SMS about meeting the President of Singapore, saying, “as u do.”
Tomorrow, hopefully, Tanzania.