It had been my assumption that Cape Town would be similar to San Francisco.

This was based on nothing beyond the inarguable fact of it being a city built beside the ocean. But as I piloted our rented Volkswagen away from the airport (internally singing to myself: “left side, left side, we drive on the left side”) a curtain of low clouds pulled across skies that had been a brilliant blue when our plane descended just an hour earlier. Iconic Table Mountain buried its flat head in a swarm of fog that poured over its jagged edges like liquid nitrogen.

Fog: just like San Francisco.

From there the comparisons to home persisted like rapid fire. The coffee house, with its cement floors, exposed beams and industrial-style furniture looked as if it’d been plucked from SoMa in San Francisco. The sliced avocado served on toasted rustic bread and sided with heirloom cherry tomatoes tasted like the state of California itself. The waterfront promenade where each evening I ran into a shifting wall of wind as the sun set in front of me could just as easily bordered Crissy Field. The trendy mexican restaurant that served hoppy IPAs and very legitimate ceviche would not have looked out of place on Valencia Street. The quirky beach towns that made for ideal day trips very well could have had names like Stinson Beach and Point Reyes.

It all brought about a distinct feeling of homesickness. Wouldn’t you know this resulted not from the photos of San Francisco’s summer and fall that light up my Facebook newsfeed but, rather, 49 days into this journey, my homesickness was born from the texture of a perfectly ripe avocado.

Don’t worry, I’m pulling through.

To call Cape Town beautiful would be an understatement.

The sophisticated city populated with surprisingly stylish people folds effortlessly into the foothills of rugged countryside whose dramatic peaks rival those of New Zealand’s south island. Frigid Atlantic waters lick pristine stretches of beach and slop over into craggy tide pools between which bronze strands of kelp glimmer in the sun. Viewed from the top of Table Mountain, the region’s breadth and beauty roll out from sea to city to sprawl to farmlands sliced into multicolored triangles and trapezoids to wine country where some of the world’s most delicious red blends are produced.

It’s all so seemingly idyllic that on Day 2 I dropped an email to one of my best friends back home – a native of Cape Town. “I know you told me once,” I said to him, “but remind me again: why on earth did you leave this place?”

Knowing that after South Africa we would head to Nepal (followed by a laundry list of Asian countries), I lapped up the western culture with enthusiasm. I ate frozen yogurt and asked lots of questions about dinner menus and even went to the movies (something I have little patience for back home). I bought brussels sprouts and broccoli and roasted them. I brewed coffee in the morning and ate granola for breakfast. I did my own laundry and took great pleasure in folding it. These are the things I miss about home.

Looking down at Cape Town Table Mountain

Stellenbosch, Wine Country

Coastal drive outside of Cape Town

Of the ways Cape Town differs from San Francisco, I’ll touch on two.

The first was instilled in me before I even left home. Over drinks on a random foggy August evening my South African friend issued a stern plea that I don’t, under any circumstances, go running after dark. “The street people in Cape Town are not harmless like the ones in San Francisco,” he insisted, likely reading the doubt in my eyes. I promised him I wouldn’t do anything stupid.

When we met the owner of our airbnb apartment upon arrival in Cape Town, she gave a similar warning, advising that we not walk more than a few blocks after dark – and even that was risking it.

A few nights later, after dinner at a restaurant in an “up and coming” neighborhood, when we asked the hostess which direction we should walk to get a cab she looked at us as if we’d each grown a second head. “Oh you don’t want to do that,” she said. “I’ll call you a taxi; the driver will come in and get you.”
I’ve never in my life known a taxi driver to actually get out of the driver’s seat for any reason other than to load my suitcase. But even more than this being peculiar, it was all just sort of sad – that this gorgeous city could host such an underbelly of crime that its people can’t walk down a lamp-lit sidewalk without tossing anxious glances over their shoulders.

As for the other thing, well, I suppose there’s no use beating around the bush about it. It has to do with black people. That I feel awkward even typing the words makes me exceedingly aware of just how unmentionable the subject is in America. As if pointing out the obvious is, in itself, a form of racism.

Apartheid ended a little more than two decades ago, which is, in the whole grand scheme of things, not very long ago at all. From the moment I climbed off the plane I felt uncomfortable about the whole thing (as if I had anything to do with it). The formal segregation of their society has ceased, but I couldn’t help noticing the places it persisted. I ate in restaurants where only white people sat and only black people served. I ordered coffee at counters where white people lined up on one side and black people stood on the other, answering requests for things like ‘extra foam’. I rode in taxis that only white people seemed to be getting in and out of while black people sat behind the wheel.

This is a sweeping generalization – a thing I’m prone to doing – but it’s what I saw, and believe me: I tried to prove myself wrong.

I assume this is less a race thing and more an economic class thing (which yes, ties back to race), but that did little to disarm my projection of resentment. In my uneducated state I sought to draw a parallel between South Africa joining the table of human equality and America’s earlier accomplishment of the same. Surely it left a some bitterness in its wake, no?

But, as I would come to learn, I should have kept my comparisons to coffee houses and good-tasting tap water.

It was at one of these restaurants where the white people sat and the black people stood that we met Nceba (pronounced ‘NTeba.’ “Your tongue must make love to your upper palette,” he directed). Nceba is a mildly flamboyant man from Johannesburg who, when he took our dinner order joked that we were ordering very little food for two Americans. “Isn’t everything over there super-sized?” he asked.

Conversation with Nceba persisted throughout the evening, culminating in an unexpected invitation issued as he cleared our plates. He wanted to take us to his neighborhood so that we could see, as he put it, “how the other half lives.” We agreed with an eagerness that two glasses of wine will grant anyone. But, the next morning, I had to wonder just what it was we were getting into. As we sat at the coffee house where we’d agreed to meet Nceba, I sipped a cup of locally roasted espresso and asked David if we were doing something stupid, “you know, going with a complete stranger to a potentially questionable neighborhood?” His response did not bolster any sense of confidence, nor did the fact that he was moving money from his wallet to his sock. But by then it was too late, Nceba walked toward us wearing a pink button up shirt and a loosely fastened purple tie, looking as harmless as anyone possibly could.

As we walked through the center of Cape Town. Nceba held out his arms as if to embrace the scene in front of him and said to us with a joyful sincerity, “Look at this: white people and black people walking together.” He explained about the segregated walkways that were abided by during Apartheid. “If you stepped out of line,” he said, “My gosh, you’d go to prison for thirty years!” He may have been exaggerating, Nceba seemed the type to do that, but if so it was only about the thirty years. I believed him that the laws of Apartheid were strictly enforced. Which is why I found the lack of resentment in Nceba’s tone so curious. Even if Apartheid had not impacted his life directly, it certainly had his parents’. I was wary of his pollyanna-like perspective.

We left Cape Town in a van so full of people that Nceba was crouched on the wheel well. This was the sort of ‘taxi’ I’d seen in Tanzania, too. Always packed to the gills with people – never a single one of them white. I watched the road signs fly by us as we rambled down the highway, tracing where we were headed so that I might find my way back in the event that I literally had to run home on my own two feet. As I write this I recognize the absurdity, yes.

After disembarking on a nondescript street corner in the township called Langa, Nceba lead us down a street lined with small cement houses. A block off of this street I saw the entrance to an ‘unpermitted settlement’ or ‘shanty town,’ as it’s less-politely but more commonly known, and anyone could see why. The homes are in fact shanties: haphazardly constructed of plywood walls and covered with slanted tin roofs that look like they would blow away like paper plates in the slightest of winds.

Langa wasn’t much to see, if I’m being honest, and I think that was Nceba’s point. The appeal of his neighborhood was not anchored to a strip of trendy shops (not that I expected this) – it was the people. The ‘vibe.’ We walked past a corner store, a gas station, a booth selling raw chickens, another corner store. A man sold shoes and used clothing, which he displayed in a heap on a blanket beside the street. Two women grilled chicken legs on a barbecue made from an oil drum.

I took in all of this, but what interested me more was listening to Nceba, who spoke with such a thoughtful eloquence I wish I’d held a tape recorder. If he hadn’t already told me that he wrote poetry I might have suggested he try.

The afternoon saw us to two different bars, or ‘she-beens,’ as Nceba called them. Both were charmless cement buildings furnished with picnic tables and a pair of pool tables. A chain link fence cordoned off the bartender and his valuable goods. A security guard frisked David and Nceba at the first bar, but not the second. You can imagine how this quietly ratcheted up my already paranoid state of mind.

In between his visits to the bar to purchase individual cigarettes, Nceba carried on with us an animated conversation about many things, one of them being in answer to my burning question: “Is there bitterness about Apartheid?” He told me there was not. That yes there were still instances of racism against blacks and yes there were obvious economic gaps but that, ultimately, there were no “hard feelings.” I believed him at least as far as the statement extended to his own personal point of view. And, as I wasn’t about to go polling everyone in the bar (an idea that unfortunately only now occurred to me) I had no choice but to let the subject rest.

It was late-afternoon when Nceba hugged us both goodbye and crammed us onto a packed taxi-van bound for the city. That evening I went for a run by the ocean and thought about everything he had said. I also thought about why it mattered to me in the first place. Why did I drop into a gorgeous country like South Africa and become preoccupied with one of its ‘less attractive’ qualities?

The answer has to do with this obsession I have (though hadn’t noticed until now) with comparing everything to America. I did it in Paris (the metro system that was superior to ours), I did it in Italy (the drivers that drove better than ours), I did it in Zanzibar (the unemployment rate that was higher than ours), I did it in the Serengeti (the buffalo that looked like our bison) and so in South Africa it was only natural that I would carry it on. An obnoxious tendency, really. America might be the world leader and the only place I truly understand, but it doesn’t need to be my yardstick for everything.

And on that note, it’s probably about time I learn the metric system.

To see more photos from South Africa, click here.