Southern Comfort

From Dar Es Salaam, we made our way three hours south to the Republic of South Africa. Stepping down at Johannesburg Airport, we played forty-five minutes of hide and seek with the driver tasked with meeting us before finally chartering a car and driver on our own. Forty-five minutes later, we found ourselves on the doorstep of Kaberi’s vivacious Carleton friend, Kgomotso, in the charming and artsy northern Johannesburg suburb of Melville. After several rounds of ear-splitting squeals and exuberant bear hugs, Kaberi and Kgomotso finally settled into rapid-fire chatter that persisted throughout dinner and drinks. Vik’s intermittent renditions of sketches from The Chappelle Show acquitted him well with Kgomotso and contributed to the evening’s funloving tone. A few hours later, Kgomotso helped us ring in our fifth wedding anniversary as the clock struck midnight. With the night having flown by, we looked forward to a week with Kgomotso in Johannesburg at the end of our stay.

The next morning, we celebrated our anniversary by first taking a 90-minute South African Airways flight west to Cape Town and then making our way to Kgomotso’s flat in the northwestern district of Sea Point. The charming and vibrant apartment served as our headquarters for the next two weeks and we quickly made ourselves at home. Residing a mere block from the beach, we strolled along a grass-lined promenade featuring views of energetic breakers crashing along the rocks. Apart from the frenetic shoreline, the surroundings reminded us more than a little bit of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.

A block or so inland from the promenade, we discovered New York Bagel, an eclectic cafeteria-style haberdasherie with plenty of cheap food options and Internet-capable PC’s. Over the course of the two weeks (to Kaberi’s chagrin), we spent many hours uploading photos, making travel plans and tracking the Boston Red Sox quest to hand yet another division title to the bleepin’ Yankees. On our return walk home, we happened upon Woolworths, a South African retail hybrid of Sears and Whole Foods where we found microwaveable Indian butter chicken dinners which soon became our daily indulgence on rainy nights.

As it turned out, we were fortunate to have the luxury of time in Cape Town, especially since our arrival coincided with the city’s rainy season. Cape Town proved to be the single most fickle city we had ever encountered on a weather basis, far surpassing Boston or San Francisco with its vicissitudes. One friendly local confided in us that his hometown boasted four seasons in a single day, and his pronouncement was hardly an exaggeration. Nevertheless, we found that the city’s wet interludes were perfect excuses for holing up on Kgomotso’s sofa with a warm blanket and cable TV. Apart from one particularly-rainy night when we braved the precipitation by venturing out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront to see the newly-released Bourne Ultimatum, we mostly stayed dry indoors.

On our first sunny day in the city, we began our adventures by catching at the corner one of the throbbing-with-hip-hop minibus taxis making their way down Sea Point’s Main Street. We found the ride to be a rite of passage as we joined eight other passengers squeezed into a miniature van with an impatient driver and an attendant endlessly hustling for business. The 4 rand per passenger journey (approximately $0.53 each) brought us into Cape Town’s surprisingly-gritty downtown where we disembarked.

We soon made our way to Cape Town City Hall, the steps of which served as the site of Nelson Mandela’s first speech after being released from prison in 1990. After navigating the nondescript, gridlike streets, we found our way to the District Six Museum. District Six was formerly a culturally-vibrant but less affluent inner city neighborhood housing 55,000 “colored” (defined as non-white but not black) working class residents. In 1953, the neighborhood was razed by the despicable Afrikaaner government in order to create whites-only housing. The resulting international outrage over the destruction and forced resettlement was so great that the area never really developed. The District Six museum was housed in a former Methodist church that escaped demolition. It contained numerous photographs and personal effects of the former residents that gave us a real sense of their former lives. The museum space itself was dominated by a poignant map created by former residents documenting their homes and surroundings and a nearly complete set of street signs that were surreptitiously rescued from imminent destruction.

After our visit concluded, we set out on an uphill walk to Tamboerskloof to meet up with two of Kgomotso’s Cape Town friends, Cassandra and Jonji, who warmly welcomed us with a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation at Addis in Cape, an excellent Ethiopian restaurant run by a successful female Ethiopian entrepreneur. We reveled in the delicious meal and good company, and hoped that our auspicious start was a sign of more good things to come.