Thousands of Miles from Home

Thousands of Miles from Home

I travel to immerse myself in differences from my normal experience, large and small.

That's why I love places like Rome where you're overwhelmed with unusual sights and sounds and smells. You bump into ancient stones everywhere. Even in a nondescript suburb, the animated Italian language will drift over from the neighborhood sidewalk café. In those warm and inviting little cubbyholes, you hear conversationalists who are gathered around tiny cups of espresso that come from the yards-long shiny brass contraptions just visible inside, behind the bar. Not at all like the hefty paper cups of scorched java you see being poured and hoisted in American tourist stops.

But on some trips you have to look a little deeper and listen a little more closely.

On a recent journey, I'm walking down a residential street with single family houses and some small apartment buildings. I see someone outside on a patio cooking on a grill. There are flowering plants and bushes in many yards. It is trash day and there are bins along the street for automated pickup.

I enter a business district and pass an Internet café, local stores and restaurants and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I pause at one of the few traffic lights in the small commercial area and watch a pickup go by with workers in the back, heading to a landscaping or construction job somewhere. Then I cross the main road, looking right to see if a car is approaching in the near lane. Now I cross some train tracks and I'm on the beach.

Looking east, I see ocean. A beach stretches out to my left and to the right is a restaurant with outside tables and a catwalk along a point that juts out into the ocean. Children with different racial backgrounds dig in the sand, a few people dip their toes in the surf since it is starting to get warmer on this early October day as the season changes.

As I walk by the outside tables snippets of conversations are overheard, mostly English. A group of Japanese tourists is tossing French fries in the air while their friends capture their pictures with greedy seagulls in the frame.

Lifeguards watch the surf, teenagers trained to respond to ocean swimming emergencies. A couple are white kids with surfer builds and one is a small, muscular black kid with short dreads and a big smile. I say hello and he greets me warmly. I met him when he was eight or nine and again a few days ago at his foster parents' house.

A group of teen-aged boys arrives. Some kick off Nikes and go throw a Frisbee on the beach while others are kicking and passing a ball around.

I walk to the end of the catwalk. People are sitting on benches reading the headlines of the local paper. A man, apparently homeless, is sleeping. I pause near the end of the point and am delighted to see a whale spouting spray in a V-shape.

I could be anywhere in the world near the ocean, right? Except for a few clues in the above description and a few things I left out. If you look right to cross the street and the weather is getting warmer in October and you look east at the water, those are clues.

You'll realize that you are in a country where they drive on the left and that you are in the Southern hemisphere. Assuming you were on the east coast of a country wouldn't be correct, however. And where would I be seeing a whale blowing that shape?

In fact, I'm in a little community on the Cape Peninsula of South Africa. The ocean is to the east because we are on the eastern side of the peninsula. If the weather is clear enough, you can make out the land across what is known as False Bay.

Now, rewind the scene to the beginning of the walk.

Many of those flowers in the little yards were lovely Proteas. A lot of the houses have gates across the driveways and high fences, sometimes with razor wire or other deterrents on top. Most of security signs say unsurprising things like 'Protected by Chubb.' Only they add this: 'armed response.' There are lots of car thefts here. And the security firms have their own forces to dispatch; they don't just call the local police.

The trash bins are the kind for automatic pickup by a truck as I mentioned, but a worker goes along the street and arranges the bins correctly for the truck. I imagine that this may be a nod to efficiency without eliminating jobs. Before the trash is picked up, the bins will be riffled through by about ten people, looking for usable food or other items.

The grill on that patio isn't called a grill or a barbeque…it's a braii. And if you 'have a braii' you are having people over for grilled meat.

When I stopped for that traffic light, I was at what the locals would call a robot. The pickup I saw is never called that…it's called a bakkie (pronounced to rhyme with lucky). The black lifeguard with white foster parents might know his heritage to be native Zulu. Among the English conversations one might hear Afrikaans or one of the other nine official languages. (Xhosa or Zulu might be likely here; fifty percent of the population of South Africa understands Zulu; and Xhosa, a Khosian language with a variety of click sounds, is indigenous to the Cape area.) Some of the unusual terms mentioned in this article, which are universally used by English speakers here, are derived from Afrikaans or these other languages.

When the kids step out of their Nikes, they aren't shedding shoes they call 'tennis shoes' or 'running shoes' or 'sneakers' (or even 'trainers' as you'd hear in England). No, they will take home sand in their takkies. And the ball they are kicking and passing isn't a football like we'd see in the NFL but a rugby ball. The homeless man wouldn't be called that. He'd be labeled a 'bergie.'

The front page headlines in the papers I see people reading don't talk about the hurricane aftermath but scream in gigantic type 'Great Whites are back." A shark attacked a kayak just off this beach recently, fortunately only biting the boat.

The whale spouting a V-shape of moisture when it breathes is a Southern Right Whale. They are mating and birthing around the Cape Peninsula this time of year.

I told people I went to the Cape Town environs this time of year for the three W's. Whales, Wine and Wildflowers. I found them, too. Fantastic wine farms; lilies with tall stems growing wild, Protea bushes as big as trees; and the whales. But I delighted also in the smaller things. The buzz about the shark. The use of unusual terms in English derived from other languages and established in isolation. (Television didn't arrive in South Africa until the mid-seventies.) I also noticed the evidence of crime and poverty. But I noticed more casual mixing of the races than on my last visit, which was in 1997, a few short years after apartheid's demise.

In short, my visit to the Cape Peninsula was very nice…or as South Africans would say…it was 'lekker.' And did it let me revel in some differences from Austin? Absolutely.