I thought I was touring Cape Town's underground drains. But five hours later I had been educated about wasted resources.
Our group tour started with a gentle hike into Deer Park on the edge of Table Mountain National Park. We peered through trees over the city skyline, viewed ruins of water-powered mills and heard about communal wash houses for laundry, gradually grasping the relevance of the converging mountain water run-off from Platteklip and Silverstroom gorge.
By the time we'd lifted covers and climbed through a manhole into underground tunnels, our guide's story had become one about the city's refusal to use water flowing down Table Mountain's slopes into catchment tunnels underneath the city bowl.
Caron von Zeil, a graduate in environmental planning and landscape architecture, has spent years campaigning to stop millions of litres of fresh water from washing out to sea.
Roughly 36% of modern city water is lost to poor infrastructure. Reservoirs pipe in water from outside, when we could be trapping Table Mountain run-off, and water from the city bowl's 36 artesian springs.
Our tunnel experience started in a sloped section of Upper Buitenkant Street where it joins Gorge Road, and continued under bridges, roads and bus terminuses towards the foreshore.
We finally climbed out of a manhole outside the Nassau point of the Castle, the tunnel continuing to Duncan Dock. This section was only a quarter of a 6.7km underground network.
We spent two hours waddling in Wellington boots. Our legs stretched around water to avoid slipping in slime or stumbling over missing bricks.
Only our headlamps illuminated the change from a narrow pipe to a bigger tunnel with darker purple bricks laid by the Dutch at its base. The British introduced the paler red bricks on top.
Near the end we found imperfect blue slate, duplicating old stones found inside the castle walls. It had a rhythm to it: people in front passed on instructions from our guide, Liberty Domingo. Everyone nearly slipped a few times, but only one fell in.
We walked inside the oldest catchment tunnels in South Africa, originating during the first 200 years of European colonisation. They were cleaner and had better ventilation than I expected.
If you're keen to sign up I'd recommend a reasonable level of fitness and agility. It wasn't difficult as much as awkward.
- Figure of Eight tunnel tours are for 10 people. The next tour is on February 28. R500 per adult. http://fo8.blogspot.com/2010/12/below-surface.html, or phone 021-439-3329
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