What an Adventure -
walking the "Tunnels" under the Cape Town Castle!
walking the "Tunnels" under the Cape Town Castle!
The Friends of the SA Museum - Iziko organised another super outing - my kind of adventure. A few hours walking with a most professional leader through the Tunnels that run under the Cape Town Castle and under most of the streets in the downtown Cape Town area with the water running out into the sea in the old Harbour. It was a perfect day and some 18 of us received a well organised briefing and handed in our Indemnity forms, donned our hard hats supplied and with the arrival of a qualified professional Rescue Medic walked past the castle Moat to a stormwater drain (see pic) and descended a ladder into the labyrinth of tunnels that run under our city. I did not know what to expect? Cool & cold sloshing through a foot of water running down the mountain through the old sewerage tunnels or hot and humid with all funny "goggas" rats & porcupines, spiders, frogs, crabs, cockroaches and fighting through spider webs? Going down the manhole cover was fun and we soon got accustomed to the dark in the tunnel. It was possible to walk upright. With torches we proceeded to follow our leader Matt Weisse from goodhopeadventures who had done an early morning recce to see that all was in order. As he predicted it was excellent and although 4 degrees lower than ground level we could walk in T shirts.
The water must have been about 6" deep and not too slippery and an easy slow walk being briefed on the construction from initial Jan van R times to the closing into a tunnel by the Brits after the 1830's. Really solid and well constructed. Plenty of sewer pipes along the way and we soon came to the junction with the Kaizergracht tunnel running up to the old District Six.
There was cabling in the tunnel for lighting put in for movies being "shot" here - specifically "Fear Factor" - a TV series. We walked to where we would have been under Strand street and could hear the motor cars on the road directly above us and the trains in the Cape Town station. It was all so very clean and the flowing water pristine - Brian Kirsch commented that it is hard to believe we have these millions of gallons of fresh water running out to sea! It was indeed a wonderful experience that I can recommend to anybody nutty enough to want to go down a manhole cover into the bowels of the earth and splish splash through a running stream. A thrilling experience and adventure!
