Five minutes up the road
Five minutes up the road
Glenbeach Residence sits in Glencairn, just outside Simon's Town's historic centre, which is the right distance: close enough for coffee, far enough for quiet. The town itself is a working harbour with three centuries behind it, and the best way to read it is on foot, from the water up.
Start on Jubilee Square. The grey ships across the water belong to the South African Navy, which still runs its main base from the dockyard here. The Victorian facades along the main street were built for a different navy, and the mountain behind them has not changed at all.
How it came to be
The Dutch East India Company found what sailors had been looking for: a bay sheltered from the winter gales that battered Table Bay. Simon van der Stel, the governor who surveyed it in the 1680s, gave it his name. The Company built the first jetty and storehouses, and the Royal Navy, when it arrived in the nineteenth century, built the rest: the dockyard, the hospital, the churches, the streets of officers' houses climbing the hill.
For a hundred and fifty years this was Britain's naval station for the South Atlantic and the route to India. In 1957 the base passed to South Africa, and the town simply carried on, as harbour towns do.
A local detail
On Jubilee Square there is a bronze statue of a Great Dane. Just Nuisance was a stray who attached himself to the sailors in the 1930s, rode the train with them to Cape Town, and was formally enlisted in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman so that his fares would be covered. He was buried with full naval honours in 1944. Children love him. So, quietly, does everyone else.
Half a day, on foot
If the history holds you, make it a morning. Coffee on Jubilee Square. The harbour wall and the yacht basin. The Simon's Town Museum in the old Residency, then the South African Naval Museum in the dockyard for the ships and the models. Lunch on the water. Then, if the afternoon is free, Boulders Beach and the penguins, fifteen minutes further along the same road.
This morning appears in the Solo Explorer and the Family Peninsula Adventure