Conflicted About Cape Town
The premise of Read + Roam is that there’s something magical about travel, and that that magic is magnified by reading, learning, and absorbing as much as you can along the way.
But the truth sometimes isn’t that simple, and while our time in Cape Town has been lovely both in ways I’ve recounted here (bookstores! long walks! museums!) and ways I haven’t (these penguins we saw in Boulder’s Bay that I used as clickbait to get you to read this!), it’s been challenging too. Comically challenging, really.
Early this week, my husband Emmett was felled by food poisoning and spent 24 hours in a fever dream. Up sick all night, he grew so delirious that he anthropomorphized his intestines, imagining himself in battle with them. He emerged from his miserable state – five pounds lighter and terrified of solid foods – just in time for a 6-hour hike up Table Mountain’s Skeleton Gorge.
With visions of a weak and feeble Emmett tumbling from a mountaintop, I advocated cancelling the hike, but he insisted. So we went, and were joined by our guide Liesl and another tourist, a German fellow who came with approximately $10,000 worth of hiking gear. We, meanwhile, wore runners and brought so little water that Liesl made us stop to buy more.
The problem, it turns out, wasn’t Emmett. He bounded up 800 stairs, gazelle-like, while Lisel remarked on the slender beauty of his calves. The problem was me. After an hour of solid stair-climbing, my heart was pounding, I felt dizzy, and my vision had begun to blur. Just 20% of the way to the top, overwhelmed and full of anxiety about how much I was letting my small team of fellow hikers (i.e. the German) down, I aborted mission.
Being more of an indoor girl – my exercise of choice is riding a Peloton for 30 minutes every morning while watching Netflix on an iPad – I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t, and the shame and disappointment (and upper-thigh burn) will stick with me.
Then today, my cell phone was stolen out of my purse. A homeless man, his pants undone, began following Emmett and I while we were out for a walk in the city center. As he begged us for money, he got closer and closer, so close that I felt him brush against me. I recoiled, shaken, and Emmett yelled at him to back off. As it turns out, he backed off with my phone. The strangest thing, in the aftermath, is how naked and helpless I feel without it – how tethered I am to technology. Even when we were waiting in line at a tech store on the waterfront, trying to figure out how to buy and operate a wifi hot spot, I kept reaching for my phone to kill time, as if for a phantom limb.
Beyond these difficulties, we’ve been plagued by a whole host of inane indignities. Our beautiful AirBnB has been slowly falling apart – all four of our bathroom lights failed simultaneously, a chair broke under me, and we discovered that our queen-sized bed has just a twin-sized comforter, causing many nighttime blanket battles. I sunburned my scalp to a crisp, got scammed by a taxi driver, cried over a cancelled UberEats order, and vomited after taking four pills that I thought were for headaches (they weren’t).
Finally, all the reading I’ve been doing about South Africa – about the oppression of the black majority at the hands of a white minority – has infiltrated my brain at some deep level. As a result, I’m moving through this country strangely, highly attuned to privileges and distinctions. I’m reading Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart and in it, Malan – an Afrikaner of Dutch descent – writes of getting preferential treatment at a roadblock, and it’s made me think guiltily of all the times I’ve casually and unthinkingly benefitted from my own appearance. In the months I spent in Jamaica, where my pale skin accorded me star treatment. In Asia, where I was a curiosity, asked to hold babies in Tokyo and pose for photos in Thailand. When traveling abroad, people have always assumed certain things about me based on my appearance alone – that I have money, that I’m not a threat, that I’m good, even. Now I feel so sick to imagine a life spent on the other side, and that sickness is impacting all my interactions with people here. I feel, in essence, some desperation to crawl out of my own Dutch skin, to undo what cannot be undone.
Today we leave Cape Town, for a week of Garden Route road-tripping followed by Johannesburg and a safari. I’m wishing for more of the good things and less of the bad. And, above all else, I’m wishing for good wifi, since I’ll be relying on the good graces of a Vodacom hotspot to holler at you from now on.