Tag Archives: Noordhoek Beach

Whale of a pilot whale beaching on Cape Town’s Noordhoek beach!

Nineteen pilot whales beached on Noordhoek beach early yesterday morning, of which fourteen died.

iol reports that five of the beached whales were transported to Simonstown, and were released back into the ocean, but one re-beached there again. Five whales died naturally, while another nine were ‘humanely euthanised’

Local residents, the NSRI, and police helped to keep the whales alive by pouring buckets of water over them and by placing towels on them.  Attracting attention across Cape Town after media broadcasts and Tweets announced the beaching, Noordhoek beach was eventually closed.

Whale researchers have not been able to explain why whales beach. It is speculated that the lead whale may become ill or caught in shallow water, and followed by the remainder of the pod.  Research also shows that marine pollution, shipping noise, as well as navy sonar noise may disorient whales and lead to the beaching. Pilot whales have a higher likelihood of beaching than other types of whales, particularly in New Zealand and Australia. Four years ago 55 killer whales beached at Kommetjie.

POSTSCRIPT 26/3: In the Cape Times Letters page today, Nan Rice, CEO of the Dolphin Action & Protection Group, corrects the incorrect media reports about the type of whales that beached, being false killer whales, and not pilot whales.  She writes critically about bystanders that criticise the euthanising of the stranded whales, and argues that it is more humane to euthanise them.  Not one of the nineteen whales survived, the whales put out into the ocean rebeaching again and also dying.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @Whale Cottage

Cape Town Tourism encourages tourists to swim with sharks! Is National Geographic campaign already a flop?

One wonders what is going on at Cape Town Tourism and its marketing of Cape Town, the little that is done! With shock we saw an advertisement for Cape Town on the National Geographic website, alongside the blogposts which their ‘Digital Nomad’ Andrew Evans had written while he was in Cape Town, inviting tourists to the city to ‘Swim with sharks’.  Not only was this advertisement irresponsible in general, but in extremely poor taste, having been posted just days after champion Camps Bay bodyboarder David Lillienfeld was fatally attacked by a Great White shark at Kogel Bay, in False Bay, on 19 April.  The advertisement was Cape Town branded.

The shark attack caused a huge outcry, in that the Kogel Bay beach does not have sharkspotters (Muizenberg, Fish Hoek, St James, Kalk Bay, and Noordhoek have them), and in that National Geographic was implicated in the shark attack, in that Chris Fisher, a documentary maker for the TV channel, had been filming ‘Shark Men in False Bay’, having received a permit allowing ‘chumming’, luring sharks with a mix of fish and oil, to the boat. The permits issued to the film team were withdrawn immediately after the shark attack, but have since been reissued, on condition that the team’s vessel Ocearch only operates near Gansbaai and in False Bay, and that a maximum of 12 sharks may be tagged, reported iol.co.za.  Reuters quoted contradictory research about the effect of chumming on shark attacks. False Bay has 260 Great White Sharks, according to shark scientist Alison Kock, reported the Cape Times. Shark cage diving, mainly talking place in the Gansbaai area, is also blamed for a greater number of shark attacks. The Western Cape provincial government is to hold a special public hearing about shark research and tourism shortly, reports the Cape Argus.

The visit by blogger and Tweeter Andrew Evans kicked off a multi-prong year-long National Geographic marketing campaign jointly sponsored by Cape Town Tourism and Durban Tourism.  No budget figures for the campaign are available, which includes coverage on National Geographic TV, as well as in the National Geographic magazines in limited countries such as China and India.

Readers of the National Geographic blog were invited to ‘follow our Digital Nomad through South African cities‘, and Andrew spent just over a week in Cape Town, from 16 – 25 April, Tweeting his way around the city (he has just more than 15000 followers on Twitter, not an extraordinary number for his international exposure, and surprisingly only about 2300 Facebook likes). Andrew documented his impressions and experiences in only five blogposts about Cape Town. Four blogspot were very short, and the last one was entitled ‘My Cape Town Favorites’ , containing more information, and sharing information about accommodation, restaurants, and sights he experienced in Cape Town.

The restaurant section intrigued me, and it was disappointing to read where Andrew had eaten: Mama Africa; Kalkys; Bread, Milk and Honey; Lola’s, Eastern Bazaar, Noon Gun, Two Oceans, and the Cape Royale, mediocre restaurants at best. The best of the collection was the Planet Restaurant at the Mount Nelson Hotel, an Eat Out Top 20 Restaurant.  Andrew did not eat at Cape Town’s (and South Africa’s) best restaurant (The Greenhouse) or at the Test Kitchen (best chef).  Just after his visit, Chef Luke Dale-Roberts’ The Test Kitchen restaurant made 74th place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants! We wrote a comment about this on the blogpost, and Andrew replied, writing that his meal at Planet was a memorable one.  We then asked via a further comment how he chose the restaurants he went to, Cape Town Tourism clearly guiding him about this! To our surprise, the comments and Andrew’s reply have since been deleted, probably at the insistence of Cape Town Tourism!  We note that a correction we offered about the ‘Signature (sic) Hill’ winery Andrew wrote about has been corrected!  Despite a Cape Town Tourism media release announcing that Andrew would also visit Robben island and the three wine routes in Cape Town, these attractions were not included in his visit. But he did go up Table Mountain, play with penguins at Boulder’s Beach, kayaked around Cape Point with Lewis Pugh, and visited the Aquarium, Kirstenbosch, Woodstock, Bo Kaap, District Six, Noordhoek Beach, Camps Bay, the V&A Waterfront, Long Street, Muizenberg, and Kalk Bay.  His experiences were mainly Tweeted with a photograph of each of his tourist destinations.  Although Andrew called for recommendations of places to see and visit in Cape Town, and receiving many suggestions, he did not appear to make time to visit any of the more unusual attractions in the city and in surrounding towns and villages.  Surprising is that Andrew did not reply to any of the travel suggestions he received, Cape Town Tourism Communications Manager Skye Grove responding to the more controversial comments (and clearly deleting those that she did not like!).

Andrew spent a week in Durban in the second half of the joint campaign with Durban Tourism, and now advertisements for Durban strongly brand the city (“Durban: The warmest place to be”) on the National Geographic blog, the advertisement and a banner for Durban running alongside the Cape Town blogposts by Andrew, which does not make marketing sense at all!  While Andrew was in Durban he made a fatal error in a racist Tweet “Black woman visiting from Jo’burg & Muslim woman watch the sunrise & the surfers at #Durban beach”. He also Tweeted about OR Thambo being notorious for theft out of luggage (ouch!) – most incoming international flights are via this airport, so the Tweet is damaging to South African tourism in general, hardly what Cape Town Tourism or Durban Tourism should be paying National Geographic for!

The multi-million Rand National Geographic marketing campaign for Cape Town and Durban has not commenced on a good note. One must question the wisdom of two (competing) cities sharing a marketing campaign (as bad as Cape Town Routes Unlimited marketing ‘Cape Town & Western Cape’ as one brand), and why Andrew’s often naive content was not checked for the many mistakes he has made, reflecting badly on our city, the premier tourism brand of South Africa!  One questions what impact this campaign has had for Cape Town, in a period when Cape Town’s tourism businesses are facing a deadly quiet second half of May, as well as June and July! Cape Town Tourism’s shark swimming advertisement is in poor taste and must be scrapped immediately!

POSTSCRIPT 11/5: The Cape Argus has reported that the public hearing will be held on Tuesday.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

‘Black Butterflies’ movie honours poet Ingrid Jonker, good for Cape Town tourism!

The just-released (in South African cinemas) internationally-produced movie ‘Black Butterflies’, about the life and death of South Africa’s Sestiger poet Ingrid Jonker, is a contrast between the most beautiful Cape Town scenery, and the dark days of our political past and the unhappy life of this talented writer.   The movie location is identified as Cape Town, and should attract international movie-goers to our beautiful city.

Dutch actress Carice van Houten and actor Rutger Hauer, who both don’t get the South African English pronunciation perfectly correct, play Jonker and her father, respectively.  The movie tells the unhappy story of how Jonker’s mother died when she and her sister were young children, were sent to stay with their grandmother, and sent back to their ‘Pa’ when she passed away.  He was a severe and critical father, and Member of Parliament, heading up the Publications Control Board, and ironically even her book of poems had to be vetted by him and his Board. They were never close, and it was his rejection of her that probably led to the sad end to her life.  Desperate to find love, she had relationships with great writers such as Jack Cope, Uys Krige, Jan Rabie, and André Brink.  The movie weaves the political history of the country in the ‘Sixties into the story, and ends with the reading of her poem “Die Kind wat Doodgeskiet is deur Soldate in Nyanga” in English by the then newly inaugurated President Nelson Mandela at the opening of Parliament in 1994.  He called her ‘one of the finest poets of our country’.  Ex-President Thabo Mbeki awarded the Silver Order of Ikhamanga to Jonker posthumously, for her contribution to literature and human rights.

The movie was shot in March and April last year, and contains the most beautiful beach and sea shots at Llandudno, and Cape Town generally is the location for the movie, with the exception of a few scenes shot in Amsterdam. Other Cape Town locations are the playgrounds and the Promenade in Sea Point, Clifton’s Second Beach (where Cope and Krige shared a bungalow), Bo-Kaap, Table Mountain, Chapman’s Peak, Strandfontein, and Noordhoek Beach. The movie ends with Jonker walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay in July 1965, becoming our country’s Sylvia Plath.

The movie is a co-production between the German Comet Film GmbH and South African Spier Productions (Pty) Limited, with post-production done by Bavaria Films in Germany. The name of the movie comes from the line in one of Jonker’s poems: “For the sun that I now cover forever with black butterflies”. While Jonker wrote her precious poetry in Afrikaans, the movie has the English translations, for practical purposes. Paula van der Oest is an Oscar-nominated director from Holland, reports the Cape Argus.  She loved the work of Jonker, and wanted to expose it to a larger audience.  South African actor Graham Clarke, playing Krige, does not do a believable Afrikaans-speaking-English accent. Irish actor Liam Cunningham is a most sympathetic Cope, whose relationship with Jonker dominates the movie.  Oddly, André Brink is not mentioned by name in the movie, even though the movie notes outside the cinema refer to his name. Brink is called ‘Eugene Maritz’ in the movie, played by local Nicholas Pauling.   Brink’s book A Fork in the Road contains an overview of Jonker’s life, and her effect on his life.

‘Black Butterflies’, Cinema Nouveau, Cavendish Square.  See the movie trailer here.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage