Cape Town

Cape Town is amazing! It is beautiful, lively, clean, and safe. I arrived here on Sat. Afternoon, and now it is Tues. evening and I leave in the morning. I am sad to be leaving such a vibrant place, but ready for a more relaxed pace as well. While we have been here we saw mostly internationalists. The only ZA that I met in fact were my waiters or tour guides. Most of the labor that keeps the city humming is hidden away from tourists view. Today as I was returning from a tour of the wine lands around the cape, I finally saw where they live. Thousands of K's of informal settlements stretched out from the back side of table mountain. The mass of people that must live in these areas is to great for me to imagine. For those of you who may have seen squatter camps at the border of Texas and Mexico, you can imagine something similar. Only here the houses are made of metal and wood and not cardboard. The cost for having a city such a Cape Town seems to be ridding on the backs of the population who lives in these areas. I wonder how long this will be sustained, and I wonder how much my coming here as a tourist contributes to prolonging these conditions. Whatever the outcome, and whatever the reason, it was still quite a shock to see such a huge show of poverty divided purely by race after seeing such affluence. Perhaps that is the real reason that I am happy to be leaving Cape Town.