On my visit to Cape Town to attend the recent Future Hospitality Summit Africa 2025 a couple of weeks ago, I first chose a hotel a few kilometers away from where the conference was to be held in the city’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront district.
At a fairer price point, I selected the 70-room Protea Hotel by Marriott Cape Town Mowbray, and what a find it was.
As regular readers will know, I often — if not always — choose hotels based on the likelihood numerous bird species might inhabit its gardens or surroundings, and my modus operandi did not change regarding this hotel.
The hotel was a wonderful introduction to my first visit to South Africa.
I guess it could be described very adequately as an urban-country retreat.
Alongside the hotel runs the Liesbeek River, which also flows beside the South Africa Astronomical Observatory facilities and grounds, 300 meters down quiet Liesbeek Avenue and in which sits a bird hide overlooking the Raapenberg Bird Sanctuary Nature Reserve.
Even though in the near distance zoomed the traffic of the Black River Parkway, I was in very good spirits.
The hotel is in two parts.
The 1880-built Cape Dutch-style manor house serves as reception area, lounge and restaurant, and parts of it resemble a museum of old photos, bric-a-brac and history. The guestrooms are on two floors surrounding a grassy square on which ibis probed for worms and gigantic ficus trees soared above.
Artifacts showed that the site had been settled in the 1660s. Table Mountain looms large in the background.
On one side of the hotel is the independent Wild Fig restaurant, it and the hotel being the only buildings in the vicinity. Wild Fig is a very good restaurant, and it has a separate bar.
I went in for a drink, and I was the only one there.
I was joined by two people who had come in to watch the United Rugby Championship final, in which Ireland’s Leinster beat South Africa’s Pretoria Bulls by 32 points to 7.
We got to chatting, and it turned out that one of them, Mark Peters, was the Africa photographer for Newsweek magazine and most famously took the first photo of Nelson Mandela upon the future-South African president’s release from prison on Robben Island.
The photo shows Mandela with a raised, clenched fist, and it was transmitted globally.
He also was the first person Mandela invited to show his prison cell.
Peters took photos in 16 war zones, including the genocide in Rwanda. He added humbly he had been sentenced to death on four occasions.
Judging a destination dangerous I assume is an exercise that gives no firm conclusions, but I might have been to a few myself, albeit not ones with bullets flying around.
I humbly mentioned what I did for a profession, and we all three started to chat about how destinations so often are at the top of the travel agencies’ must-do lists only to fall precipitously to the very bottom.
Some return. Some do not.
Not one other person entered the bar.
What struck me — and I did not vocalize this — is that this episode was another occasion in which the stars of travel had aligned themselves.
Maybe not for them, but at least for me.
Yes, I can be chatty, but this was another example of the wonder of travel, that if one throws themselves out there, wonderful experiences and meetings almost always take place.
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