Trip to Cape Town: Day 5 (Wed, Feb 24)

My third full day in Cape Town started with another amazing breakfast (I skipped the run because my legs can't currently handle running on three consecutive days). After breakfast, I headed up to the UCT campus to use the internet and try to upload some pictures and videos. Turns out the campus internet is difficult to connect to and incredibly slow, so that did not work out so well.

The plan for the day was to tour iThemba LABS, the national cyclotron facility about 15 miles north on Cape Town. At 10:45, I headed down to meet Rudolph, one of the Physics lecturers, at teatime. After an interesting discussion about health care policies with some of the Physics faculty and students over tea and coffee, we headed out to iThemba. After a 20-25 minute drive, we arrived, stopped at the gate to get our passes and drove around this large building (picture above). The other thing that I noticed was the wildlife inside the compound. There were birds, gazelles (picture left, new movie studio in background) and even zebra just wandering around the buildings. Rudolph tells me that the animals are there to reassure the public that radiation is safe.

iThemba LABS (Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences) has two basic operations and is split into two halves, a medical radiation half and Physics research half. The director of the medical radiation portion was going to be my tour guide for the day, but there was some problem with his son, so he was not able to come. Instead, Rudolph showed around until one of the Medical Physicists was able to take over. There is a hospital wing where patients could stay if necessary, a CT scanner to image the patients and find the tumors, a proton treatment room and a neutron treatment room. There was a patient undergoing neutron treatment while we were there. The facility was impressive, but clearly set up more for research than for clinical aesthetics. There was also an effort to build another proton treatment room, but had stalled due to a lack of funding.

Over lunch (toasted tomato and cheese sandwich), I found out that they were looking for a research Physicist with Monte Carlo experience (right up my alley minus the teaching). In the afternoon, we headed back to campus, but Rudolph wanted to show me another area university, where he used to teach, the University of the Western Cape. It also gave me a chance to see some of the area outside of the city of Cape Town. The drive made me feel like I was back in the Africa that I knew. Trash blowing across the road, "buses" stopping in the middle of the road to pick people up, dirt roads running through neighborhoods and barely-standing make-shift buildings. It was a reminder of the history of South Africa with apartheid. The racial barriers may be gone, but there is a still a clear 1st world feel to Cape Town contrasted by the 3rd feel of the surrounding areas. We arrived back at the UCT campus in time for tea. I ran into Will and we decided to head up to Table Mountain on our last day in Cape Town. More on that tomorrow.