Mosselbaai is a small port town on South Africa’s southern cape. With an economy based on tourism, the area has many beautiful and interesting locations to stop by along the way. As the National Geographic Orion came into port, the group set out with an expeditionary style, ready to take on the day with a variety of different activities. The busy itinerary included a visit to the local museum, a trip to the cave of Cape St. Blaize, and a visit to the Heart to Heart association, which assists underprivileged youth.
The museum of Mosselbaai pays tribute to the remarkable historical landmark that is this very city. On February 3, 1488, Europeans landed on South Africa for the first time, and at this very bay. Bartolomeu Dias and his team of Portuguese explorers came onto land near to where the iconic museum stands today, but were quickly chased off by angry locals who did not want visitors. The same area of the town exhibits the “Post Office Tree” where a following explorer left a note in a shoe, hung from a tree, for a comrade to find. When the friend found this note, he wrote back and left his note in the same tree, also in a shoe. This began a tradition that held fast for several decades, and one that is still respected in Mosselbaai today.
Cape St. Blaize Cave is an incredible site for early human archeology. It is a well-accepted theory that today’s human population derived from about 600 individuals who lived on the African continent 100,000 – 200,000 years ago. However, more recently, the Mossel Bay Archeology Project has theorized that the Southern Cape of South Africa is in fact where humans began projecting and developing modern behaviors, about 164,000 years ago. Within these caves, paleontologists have found evidence to suggest early Middle Stone Age humans were using heat to work stone, harvesting sea life (in the form of shellfish) and using complex dyes to create symbols. The cave at Cape St. Blaize is one of the earliest studied in this system, and a very important piece to this archeological puzzle, as it contains material from 200,000 years ago.
Mosselbaai proved to be a wildly captivating historical site as well as a lovely, low key location for art and walking. With wonderful trips to important archeological caves and stupendous museum tours, the guests aboard National Geographic Orion returned tired and happy, ready for another day of adventure.
