"Friendship Force" makes Cape Town trip special

Welcome, said Sir Francis Drake, "to the fairest cape on the whole circumference of the Earth."

Well, yes, but Sir Francis was there in 1580.

Welcome to Cape Town, 2008. It's still a fair city, nestled between massive Table Mountain and the wind-swept Atlantic. But unseen from the tour buses are the shantytowns outside the city that still bear the scars of apartheid, the racial segregation policy that ended in the 1990s.

Wanting to see South Africa in the post-apartheid era - and not wanting the usual "shallow" tourist experience - my daughter, Amelia, and I signed up with a Friendship Force expedition called "South African Festival," though it wasn't a festival in the usual sense.

Global networking

The Friendship Force International, founded in Atlanta in 1977 by a group including former President Jimmy Carter, has a mission to promote personal friendships across the barriers that separate people. We are called "ambassadors," encouraged to bond with the people through a network of home-stay exchanges between chapters in 50 countries, including three in Cape Town.

We were fortunate to be assigned to the Mispah, a mostly black or mixed racial club, because our host family turned out to be the most hospitable you could find anywhere. Edward Walker, 67, and his wife, Catherine, 65, retired garment workers, grew up in District Six, the notorious apartheid "resettlement" site. After District Six was declared a whites-only area in the 1960s, more than 60,000 people were uprooted and their homes bulldozed.

On our nontourist tour we visited the District Six Museum, a converted Methodist Mission Church packed with such memorabilia as a park bench painted "Europeans Only." A black dog could sit on that bench but not a black man, mused our host, Edward Walker.

We spent four days with the couple in their comfortable unpretentious home in a quiet neighborhood, enjoying bountiful home cooking, meeting their five well-educated children and grandchildren who live nearby (except for one daughter in California) and being driven anywhere in the Cape Town area we wanted to go.

The Walkers don't dwell on the past, and neither did we. As ambassadors, we were a fun-loving, diverse group composed of seven Swedes (happy to get away from the Scandinavian winter), 12 lively Brits, an engaging Brazilian couple, a colorfully costumed Nigerian mother and daughter, and assorted representatives from Singapore, Japan and the United States.

After our 19-hour flight from New York on South African Airways and a delayed short flight from Johannesburg, we were greeted with big smiles by our tour coordinator, Jo Olsen, and her husband, Paul, who had waited two hours for us at the Cape Town Airport. Well-fed, protected and entertained, we spent a week in Cape Town and a second week roaming the Garden Route from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean shores in a roomy motor coach with the most knowledgeable driver we had ever encountered on a tour.

We sampled a lot of local wine, mostly in the Constantia Valley, the South African equivalent of Napa Valley. Our first tasting was in Groot Constantia, the oldest wine estate, whose history mirrors that of South Africa from the early Dutch settlers through various conquests. Our luggage already was stuffed with South African vintage by the time we reached the Stellenbosch wine lands for more tastings.

Free-ranging elephants

We also saw a bit of South African wildlife. My favorites were the elephants in the Knysna Elephant Park near Plettenberg Bay, an open range with no fences or barriers to separate us. Elephants love to eat, and they happily scooped up fruits and vegetables from the palms of our hands and patiently allowed us to pet them.

Once ivory hunters reduced their numbers from 25,000 to 400. "Pianos caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of elephants," read the history on the walls of the visitors center.

What keeps these gentle giants from roaming off the unfenced park, someone asked.

"Love," the keeper replied facetiously. "What keeps a woman in the house?"

Amelia and I chose not to "ride" the giant ostrich on the Highgate Ostrich Farm. Too touristy and unkind an activity, it seemed. And we were glad we had enjoyed ostrich steak before, not after, seeing these noble birds.

Heart-stopping views are so plentiful that one doesn't have to seek them out, but the view from a cable car ascent in the Table Mountain National Park was especially spectacular, as was the road to the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of Africa. Warned that the baboons along the road were aggressive and have been known to climb into cars to rummage for food, we were content to watch them from the bus window.

My last "must see" was the South African Jewish Museum with its reconstruction of a Lithuania Jewish village, because my great uncle was among the thousands of Lithuanian Jews who migrated here. The Walkers obligingly took us there, and Catherine told us of the Jewish merchants in District Six who let you take a whole year to pay for your Easter outfit.

The food generally was delicious throughout the trip, but the best was the Indian-style home cooking of Catherine, who is part Indian, and her daughter, Beverley.

Most remembered was the warmth of the people, black and white, and a moment at our farewell party when a Nigerian woman sang "We Are the World," and we rose spontaneously and joined hands from table to table. It was one of those moments that can never be repeated or forgotten.

IF YOU GO

The Friendship Force International operates through clubs in 50 countries. Most exchanges are sponsored by individual clubs. Festival, Humanitarian and Discover tours are coordinated from international headquarters in Atlanta. Individual ambassadors are welcome to join exchanges sponsored by clubs other than their own.

But the best way to become an ambassador is to join the club nearest you through a list on their Web site, thefriendshipforce.org.

The Friendship Force of Long Island, 631-586-5066, is planning exchanges to Ra'anana, Israel, in October and San Antonio, Texas, in November.

The next South African exchange is planned for October by the Rocky Mountains club. Interested members from other clubs should e-mail coordinator Christine Hall at christinehallep@aol .com. Round-trip fares from New York to Cape Town on South African Airways start at about $1,300, including tax.