Cape Town Nocturne

An excerpt from my Cape Town journals 2010. More from my travels to come…

Cape town is an unassumingly wonderful city with a subtle mind. Its native ethos serendipitously creeps under your skin and into your soul and before you can realize, it steals away a piece of your heart that you never knew was there. What a guileful thief it turns out to be.

My largest struggle with my time here so far is that the city feels almost too familiar to me; from the moment I stepped out onto its streets it was like meeting an old friend. The cultural landscape is different, yet I became comfortable in it almost immediately. I feel guilty, as though I should be more inconvenienced, more amazed, more dumbfounded; but I find that this is not the Africa I was told to expect, or what media and statistics dictate. It is Africa as I now know it, as I will remember it, and as I will cherish it.

For even as I sit here writing, gradually the pulse of the city becomes my own… and I feel my heart beating in time with the familiar piercing whistles of taxi drivers racing past, the clanging of beer bottles sounding in the bars lining the streets, the persistent beat of the music resonating from a local café. I sit here and feel comfortably content beneath the shadow of the ominous magnificence of Table Mountain; always watching, listening, waiting…

A short excerpt from my Cape Town journals, 2010. More to come in a series of travel writing from 2010-present. Stay tuned.