Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town is not only the oldest city in Southern Africa, founded by Dutch settlers in 1652, it’s also the most picturesque, built between a seafront and the dramatic Table Mountain, and enjoys a temperate California climate year round. Given its tourism credentials, and its extremely inconvenient distance from the USA, we thought it best to visit before we permanently departed the Motherland.

We found Cape Town much more inviting and walkable than sketchy Johannesburg, South Africa’s apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, and Southern Africa’s largest and most dangerous metropolis. But even postcard perfect Cape Town has its dark side. Given the recent history of apartheid, race relations in the city are still viscerally tense, and violent crime is a constant threat. Having navigated cross-cultural challenges continuously during the past two years, we had plenty of skills to cope with these obstacles, but in South Africa everything is exaggerated, probably explaining why the country’s Peace Corps completion rate is the lowest in the entire Peace Corps. We explored some of this history on a tour at the Robben Island maximum security prison; the site of Nelson Mandela’s captivity during some of South Africa’s darkest times.



Segregation far exceeds levels we are accustomed to in the United States with many posh all-white neighborhoods surrounded by more distant ghetto-style black townships. We also had an unsavory taste for the ever-present danger of violence when an aggressive street hustler threatened to cross the line in downtown Cape Town, but the police quickly intervened, weapons in hand. It’s something that happens in all big cities, but with one of the largest wealth disparities between rich and poor, and white and black, its all the more common in South Africa.


Despite the disagreeable underlying realities which make Cape Town a place neither of us would like to live in, it is an amazing place to visit. The city is full of historical sites, parks, and museums, everything having received a facelift for the 2010 World Cup. We stayed on a pedestrian avenue were we could walk to an array of funky restaurants, souvenir shops, or curio stands.


We rented a little car and saw all the big sites, including a driving tour of wine country, and a road-trip all the way to the Southwestern-most point of the continent, the Cape of Good Hope, where baboons tried to hitch a ride on our windshield and Luc led our group on a walking safari where we encountered a herd of large Bontebok antelope with babies and a group of ostriches running on the beach.



We also visited the largest colony of breeding African penguins in a protected cove.



Another highlight involved hiking the city’s dramatic topography to countless amazing views, including the very top of Table Mountain, recently declared one of the 7 new Natural Wonders of the World.


We enjoyed the steep hike up, but decided to take the scenic cable car down.


Culinary highlights included Mexican-like food, eating extremely big sandwiches at a sports bar, Ethiopian food, and several picnics full of chips, cheese, crackers, olives, and other assorted snacks not available in Mozambique, purchased at the outrageously American supermarkets. We even got a candle light Christmas concert in spectacularly beautiful, Kristenbosch, one of the premiere botanical gardens in the world specializing in the unique Cape Floral Kingdom.


South Africa is the most American of places in Africa, and indeed a few times it actually felt like we were back in the USA, in a fully stocked grocery store, or at the mall all decked out in Christmas decorations, or hiking on a well maintained and signposted trail, or dining in a sports bar, which was admittedly showing rugby instead of football, but the club sandwiches were just as obscenely stuffed with chicken and bacon as you would expect back in the USA.