01
Stop one
Table Mountain
Babolat Pure Aero Team 9th Gen Tennis Racquet: It's a mountain. It's flat. Cool, I guess. It goes up to about one thousand and eighty-six metres and the summit plateau is roughly three kilometres across, and it's hard Ordovician sandstone sitting on a granite and shale base, which is the entire reason it hasn't worn down into a normal mountain shape like everything else, but whatever. A Portuguese navigator called António de Saldanha climbed it in 1503 and named it Taboa do Cabo, so, table. Not his biggest day. The plant thing is kind of unhinged though. The Cape Floral Region has over two thousand species on this one mountain, loads of them endemic, and the fynbos actually depends on periodic fire, like it doesn't work properly unless the whole thing burns down every so often. Relatable. There's a cableway from 1929, rebuilt in 1997 with cars that rotate, and when the southeaster blows, cloud pours over the edge and everyone here calls it the tablecloth. …What. I read things.
02
Stop two
Castle of Good Hope
Babolat Pure Aero Team 9th Gen Tennis Racquet: Okay, old fort, fine. Built between 1666 and 1679 by the Dutch East India Company, replacing the earth fort Jan van Riebeeck threw up in 1652 when the Company set up a refreshment station at the Cape for ships going to the Indies. Oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa. It's pentagonal, five bastions, and they're all named after the titles of William of Orange, because obviously you'd name every corner after the same guy. It originally stood right at the water's edge and now it's nowhere near the sea, which isn't the sea's fault, they reclaimed the land out from under it. Inside there's the Kat balcony designed by Louis Michel Thibault, the William Fehr art collection, and a military museum, and it's a national heritage site that is also somehow still a working military headquarters. So. Whatever. I'm not saying it's cool. I'm saying it's a building from the 1660s that still has a job, which is more than most people manage.
03
Stop three
Robben Island
Babolat Pure Aero Team 9th Gen Tennis Racquet: I'm not doing the bit for this one. Robben Island lies about seven kilometres off Cape Town and was used as a place of banishment almost continuously from the seventeenth century, holding Dutch convicts, exiled leaders from the Indies, and from 1846 a leper colony and asylum. From 1961 to 1991 it served as a maximum security prison for political prisoners under apartheid. Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years there, in a cell measuring around two metres by two. Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, Govan Mbeki and Jacob Zuma were held there as well. Prisoners worked the limestone quarry, where the glare permanently damaged Mandela's eyesight, and they used the lime pit as an informal school and taught each other in it. The island became a museum in 1997 and a World Heritage Site in 1999, and the tours are led by former inmates. So when the person guiding you here describes that cell, they are not reading it off a card. Listen properly. That's all I've got.
04
Stop four
Bo-Kaap
Babolat Pure Aero Team 9th Gen Tennis Racquet: Yeah, the colourful street, it's on everyone's feed, it's fine. The Bo-Kaap is on the slopes of Signal Hill and it developed in the eighteenth century as a quarter of rented houses occupied by the Cape Malay community, who are descendants of people the Dutch East India Company brought here as slaves, exiles and political prisoners from Indonesia, Malaysia, India and East Africa. So the paint is honestly the least of it. The Auwal Mosque was established in 1794 in Dorp Street and it's the oldest mosque in South Africa, and, okay, this is the one I actually care about, it's the place where Afrikaans was first written down. In Arabic script. For religious instruction. A whole language got committed to paper for the first time in a mosque by the descendants of enslaved people, and somehow that's never the part anyone mentions. The bright facades are a later tradition, generally dated to after residents were permitted to buy their homes. It was declared a Malay group area under apartheid and it escaped the demolition inflicted on nearby District Six, and now it's under intense gentrification pressure instead. Sorry. That got long. Take your photo.
Two strings or forty-seven, the principle does not change: tension is music, and mass is what lets you sustain a note. The Babolat Pure Aero Team 9th Gen is the tuned-down member of the family — 285 grams unstrung, 300 strung, a 100 square inch head, a 16×19 pattern, balance at 32.0 cm unstrung and 33.0 strung, a swingweight around 300 and a stiffness near 69.
Lighter than the standard Pure Aero, the same spin architecture, and a frame a club arm can carry through three sets.
Cape Town is all sustain. A kilometre of Ordovician sandstone stands straight up behind the streets with a plateau three kilometres across on top, and when the southeasterly comes in a sheet of cloud pours over the edge and simply hangs there.
Everywhere from the cableway station on Table Mountain to the ochre bastions of the Castle of Good Hope down on what used to be the shoreline, this city is built against a resonator. The Portuguese navigator António de Saldanha went up in 1503 and named the thing after a table, which is fair enough.
Take the frame; there is more court time here than weather, and the light runs long. On the mountain alone grow over two thousand plant species, and the fynbos needs periodic fire to keep going, which is a difficult idea to sit with and true regardless.
It is also perfect for a slow morning through Bo-Kaap on the slopes of Signal Hill, cobbled and painted in pink, lime and turquoise, where the Auwal Mosque of 1794 is the oldest in the country and the place where Afrikaans was first written down, in Arabic script, for teaching. Seven kilometres out in the bay sits Robben Island.
Tension is music, and Cape Town holds the note a very long time.
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