Ashley our Chess and Scrabble Pro - Have you met one?

We went out in the Free Taxi and picked up some incredibly interesting people. 

Ashley, is a Chess coach and professional Chess player.  We, personally, have never met a Chess player. We mean, seriously - have you? We were even more excited when he told us he is also a Western Province Scrabble player. We kid you not. Apparently, Chess wasn't doing it for him any more, so he 'recently' took up Scrabble. Furthermore, there is in fact a national Scrabble League which holds Scrabble tournaments, one of which Ashley actually won last week. How can nobody know about this? Probably because it happens in Pinelands. We imagine a heavy wooden door with one of those slidey face porthole things where you have to spell a really long word to get into a room full of people wearing dark glasses and sweating over their vowels and consonants.

Ashley invited us to check it out. However, everybody knows that Art Directors cannot spell and we would thus have to ask them to make a special exception for Chris, and to not laugh at him too much. Ashley has also agreed to teach us how to play Chess, a skill neither of us have ever managed to obtain. Chris might be good at Chess, though, because is is quite good at maths and can do long arithmetic in his head. We're definitely going to check out the Western Province Scrabble league.

Check out the videos below.

The 2-Way Interview - Creative Cape Town's Jess Henson

Last week we were contacted by Jess Henson, a successful freelance writer and one of the people behind the Creative Cape Town initiative. She wanted to speak to us about the project, so we offered her a ride in our Free Taxi. What ensued was a very interesting two-way interview with an extremely interesting woman.

Shannon first met Jess years ago at an exhibition opening in the CBD, where they committed petty theft and drove over a pavement. A staple of the Cape Town creative scene, she’s written for Cape Town’s top creative chronicles (under the pen name Jezebel) and has carved out a reputation for herself as one of the CT’s best freelance writers. She is also in love with the city where she lives. We spoke to her about blogs, Capetonians and the amorous advances of taxi commuters. Check out the video below.

Taxi Driving For Beginners: A Crash Course

So, yesterday, we were driving down Strand Street to drop a passenger off at the station when we stopped at a red light. A real taxi pulled up next to us. The driver took one look at our cardboard ‘Free Taxi’ signs (which we forgot we shouldn’t really put on our taxi, for this very reason) and scowled. He shouted at us. FREE TAXI?! We quickly assured him that our Taxi was not actually free and is, in fact, the most expensive taxi in the CBD, so expensive that people have to take loans to go in our Taxi and the ‘free’ part was ‘free’ as in ‘freedom’ or something like that. This is all, obviously, not true. But at that moment, we felt it appropriate to lie. Through our chattering teeth.

This appeared to mollify him. He then eyed out the Carolla and asked if we wanted to swop taxis with him. We said we’d consider it. He then offered to buy the Carolla (everybody wants to buy the Carolla) and made a substantial cash offer. We asked him for his number.

His name is Ade. Scowl is his natural facial expression. While we were taking his details we explained the project, and how we have discovered that we are the worst Taxi drivers the City, possibly the world, has ever seen. We asked him if he’d give us a lesson, and because Ade is actually a legend guy, he agreed, saying it would be his pleasure.

So, today, he picked us up on Shortmarket and Long in one of his 10 taxis, and we set forth on one of the fun-est adventures we’ve ever had – a short course in Cape Town Taxi Driving, with Chris as driver and Shannon as gaaitjie, under the tutelage of a talented Taxi Driver called Ibraheem. It was awesome. 

Charly's Bakery

Silver-chocolate-denim-luff-luff-silver-sparkle-white-petal-gardens. There is a place where this phrase actually makes sense, and after a long morning of Free Taxi driving, we ended up there, at Charly’s Bakery, for lunch yesterday.

You can’t really miss the building, as it is covered in a wall-to-wall mural and the trademark neon pink and white stripes. You walk in, and you’re a kid again. It’s that simple. Lumo cupcakes, chocolate everything. Tarts, cookies and confectionary of every kind. Enough sugar in the vicinity to put you into a diabetic coma. Absolutely glorious.

We met with Alex, one of Charly’s daughters and one of the people largely responsible for the incredible range Charly’s Bakery produces. Charly himself, who has been baking since he was 14, has actually retired, and the business is now run by the women of the family, with matriarch Jaqui at the helm. Alex and the team have designed and produced cakes for the likes of Nelson Mandela, Elton John, Oprah, Thabo Mbeki and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She once put a wedding cake together in 20 minutes after a docket slipped through the cracks. The bottom line is that these ladies know their what they’re doing. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

Mention Charly’s Bakery to any Capetonian and you’ll be met with all kinds of salivation. The place is, to quote their slogan, Mucking Afazing. Yet they aren’t overpriced, they aren’t snobbish, they’re just an functional family business run with decisiveness, confidence and a generous dash of sound business sense. Their stuff is in such demand, they operate a night shift and a day shift, so that they are literally baking 24 hours a day, all year round.

So, if you’re looking for a lunch spot or a birthday cake in the CBD, Charly’s is pretty much it. There’s a seating area out front where you can watch people go by and enough parking for minimum hassle. The coffee’s great. The food is great. And so is the sugar rush. Check out our video below.

Thando Jack

Our second fare was a young couple we picked up on Orange Street - Mr. Thando Jack and his friend Ms. Belinda. We asked them where they liked to go in the City. Thando Jack recommended some places in Gug’s, like Mzoli’s and Soli’s, which is, apparently, much like Mzoli’s, only it’s called Soli’s. And apart from Mzoli’s and Soli’s, he recommended we check out a spot called Ace’s Place. We took his number.


We asked them how they made a living in the City. Belinda works in a hotel. Thando Jack shyly let us know that he was, in fact, currently unemployed and looking for a job in a hotel. Which explained his dapper three-piece and the leather binder on his lap, and left us wondering. How does an impeccably presented, well-spoken and formidably named guy like Thando Jack struggle to find a job in the City?


We’ve decided to help him. We’re putting the word out. Help us find Thando Jack a job. Check him out in our latest video.

Getting our taxi service going

So we pimped our taxi and hit the streets today. All was going well until we backed out the driveway and reached a walking speed, at which point our entire corporate branding effort began to flap like an epileptic in the light breeze. May need to rethink this for Monday. 

When we eventually managed to actually arrive in town, alive and not in police custody, we were faced with another problem: Nobody seemed to give a s**t about our Free Taxi. The problem with Capetonians, of course, is that they have seen everything. And our face melting signage was, clearly, not as face-melting as we had previously thought due to the unfortunate loss of half of it, including our ‘Free Ride’ sign, on the treacherous highway. We were very upset. We played our Nigerian reggae music louder, in the hopes of attracting at least a little cynicism. No dice. And no customers.

Eventually, Chris was made ‘gaaitjie’ and thus trusted with the task of verbally eliciting business from the passenger side window. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that, not only was Chris the worst ‘gaaitjie’ in the WHOLE WORLD EVER, his method of trying to convince young, single woman to ‘get in the car’ because ‘we have DRINKS for you… No, please ignore the camera…’ was doing more harm to our brand image than anything else. He was subsequently demoted.

Nevertheless, we did manage to convince a few people to take a free ride and share some stories with us as to where they like to go in the City, what to do when unemployed and why babies are better out than in. Check out our webisodes for more.

Our Ride