The Contrasts of Cape Town

There are plenty of places on this continent, and in this country, that experience greater poverty than urban Maputo. There are certainly a few wealthier places, as well.

Nowhere are these contrasts as sharp as in South Africa, and perhaps nowhere in South Africa are they as distinct as in Cape Town, where we spent some holiday time over Christmas.

Cape Town is a city of wealth unknown in Maputo, even if that wealth is only a thinly-brushed veneer.

Traveling from the airport, we passed entire neighbourhoods of Africa's trademark corrugated roof shanties, and plenty of evidence of more solidly-built but equally small housing provided by the government. The seeds of progress. Cape Town's poverty was quickly left behind as we reached the office towers and tourist shops that make up the city bowl.

Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa. It's the city where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island in the height of the country's disgrace called apartheid, and where he later took his seat as the post-apartheid republic's first president.

Immediately beside the seat of legislative power is a museum that was once a slave lodge prominent in a city that served as an important hub of slave trade activity. The museum that now celebrates racial freedom creates parallels between South Africa's apartheid experience and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, drawing inspiration from the latter that South Africa can move beyond its racist history.

Simo, who lives 2,700 km away in Malawi but works in Cape Town part of each year to earn additional money, was our host at a small bed and breakfast that we used as our staging ground as we prepared our day-long excursions into the city. He preferred home: sure, Cape Town is beautiful, but the problem is that it's on the ocean. When people have no money, they have nowhere to go for fresh water. At least people in Malawi, situated on a large in-land freshwater lake, don't die, he said.

The fact is that people in Malawi die far too frequently of starvation, but Simo's point was that there are certain benefits to being able to live in a country where survival doesn't depend on participation in a formal trade-based economy. Simo's life back home, where the lakes are full of fresh water and the neighbourhood's trees shed plentiful fruit for the taking, is free of the complexities of a global world.

We met another man who also lives in Malawi but works in Cape Town's booming tourism industry to be able to send money home. Working as a hotel porter is far better than the harsh conditions faced by the previous generation, who traveled to South Africa to earn money working in the gold mines of Johannesburg.

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Cape Town continued to build upon our image of Africa as a continent of natural beauty, as well, and in so doing drove the stake deeper into the heart of the mythology of Africa as a dry, desolate and depressing desert (click on any of the photos below for a larger version):

• Cape Town's signature Table Mountain (also pictured above) is appreciated most after a sweaty and occasionally difficult two-hour climb.

• The Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens illuminate the extreme diversity of plant life in the Eastern Cape, like the famous protea family of flowers.

• Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, focal points of natural beauty and often mistakenly thought of as the southernmost tip of Africa (even the tourist shops traded on this mistake, selling a wide variety of goods incorrectly emblazoned with the slogan, "Where two oceans meet.")

• Boulders Beach, a small sandy patch of False Bay where the photogenic African penguins spend their days hobbling around under the sun and enduring the paparazzi-flashes of streams of tourists.

• Similar hot spots where entire colonies of seals compete for attention and the prize of being captured on all manner of digital devices (or could it be that they just want to be left alone to lay on the rocks and bask in the heat of the sun?)

• A spectacularly developed waterfront, including the Two Oceans Aquarium, providing up-close examination of southern Africa's spectacularly colourful sea life.

Once again Africa, a hugely underrated continent, has not failed to show off its impressive natural beauty.