Day 2

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Cape Town — Sea Point, Table Mountain, and back on foot

She was right about the weather. We came out into a clear, cold, bright Cape Town morning — turned right out of the gate, crossed Main Road, went a little way left — and had breakfast at a place called BUTTER, which does one thing and does it seriously. A full plate: eggs, bacon, sausage, the works, and coffee that kept coming. We had eaten nothing but airline food for a day and a half. I do not think I have ever been happier to see a plate.

The Promenade

Then we walked down to the sea. The Sea Point promenade runs for miles along the Atlantic, a wide paved path between the grass and the rocks, and on a winter morning it belongs to runners, dog-walkers, and old men doing very slow exercises facing the water. The ocean here does not lap. It arrives. It hits the rocks and goes up, and the wind takes the top off it and puts it on you.

The bird is a hadeda ibis, and it is the most South African thing in this book. They are everywhere, they walk around on lawns with the confidence of a bird that knows nobody is going to bother it, and they make a noise at dawn like a rusty gate being murdered. Every South African has an opinion about hadedas. None of the opinions are neutral. And then there were the sunglasses.

The Mountain We Did Not Climb

We took an Uber up to the lower cable station, which sits on the shoulder of Table Mountain with the whole city laid out beneath it, and then we decided not to go up. There were two reasons, and both of them were good ones. The first was arithmetic. Table Mountain was on the tour — the group would be going up during the Cape Town extension at the end, with EF. Paying to ride the cable car twice, three weeks apart, is a thing a person can do. It is not a thing a person should do. The second was that we were already looking at it. That shelf of rock where you queue for the car is itself most of the point: the city runs out beneath you from the mountain down to the harbor and the bay, Robben Island sits flat and pale in the haze, and the whole shape of the place — how it is wedged between the rock and the water — is right there, entire, for free. Going higher would mostly have made the same thing smaller.

I thought I had taken more photographs up there than I actually had. There are a few, and they are all more or less this, and one view of a city is enough. And we did go up, in the end — weeks later, with the group, with Dylan telling us what we were looking at. But that comes much later in this book, and by then we had been to Botswana, and the mountain meant something different.

Twenty-three Thousand Steps

Then we decided to walk back to the hotel. It is worth saying plainly that we did not have to do this. There were Ubers. There is a whole city of Ubers. But it was a beautiful afternoon and the hotel was over there somewhere and we are the kind of people who say “how far can it be,” which is the last thing a lot of people ever say. The pull of the sea was strong. It is strong for both of us, and it was strongest for Bonnie: get to the water, follow the water, the water goes past our hotel. It is a beautiful theory, and on a coastline that runs in a straight line it would have worked perfectly. Cape Town's coastline does not run in a straight line. Cape Town sits on a peninsula, and a peninsula has water on more than one side of it, which means “toward the sea” is not a direction. It is several directions, and some of them are the wrong one. You can walk downhill to the water, arrive at the water, feel entirely vindicated by the water — and be further from your hotel than when you started, because that is a different piece of ocean than the piece your hotel is on. So the water kept being right there, downhill and visible and obviously correct, and the phone kept pulling us the other way: inland, around, along the shape of the land instead of the shape of the map in our heads. And the phone kept changing its mind about when we would get there. That is the part I remember most clearly. We set off, and the GPS gave us an arrival time. An hour later — having walked steadily, having complained very little — we checked again, and the arrival time had gotten later. Not by a minute. Meaningfully later. We had walked for an hour and the hotel had moved further away. It did that more than once. And I will be honest about where my head went: I stopped looking at the view. I stopped caring about the architecture, the gardens, the extremely nice houses. I cared about one number on a screen, and the only thing I wanted in the world was to watch it go down. Eventually it went down. Twenty-three thousand steps. Somewhere around ten miles. Certainly twice as far as it needed to be.

How far can it be?

Me, wrongly, at the top of a mountain

Here is the part that makes it a story, and it happens weeks from now. At the very end of the trip we came back to Cape Town with the group — nine of us by then — and as the van was driving into the city Dylan gave us the talk. Don't walk. Take an Uber, or take the van, but don't set off on foot, not here, not on your own. And I laughed. Barely. Under my breath, mostly to Bonnie, I said something like we already walked the whole city. Dylan heard me. He turned around and called me out, in front of everyone, and he was not unkind about it but he was not joking either. I could do whatever I liked after the tour ended. While I was in his care he was responsible for my safety, and for everyone else's, and that was not a thing he was going to negotiate on a moving vehicle. And here is the thing I did not say in the van, because I had not worked it out yet. We were not brave that Wednesday. We were oblivious. That is a different thing and it deserves a different word. At no point in ten miles did either of us feel a flicker of it — no watched feeling, no wrong street, no moment of let's-turn-around. Nothing. We walked through a city we did not know, in a country we had been in for one day, reading a phone, and the entire time we felt completely fine. Which is not evidence that we were fine. It is only evidence that we could not tell. That is what Dylan was actually saying. He had eight other people to bring home and no way of knowing what any of us would do with permission. And — he mentioned this himself, and it is the part that ends the argument — he lives here. He was not reciting a liability paragraph from a binder; he was telling us what he knew about the streets we were driving through, the way you would tell a visitor which neighborhood back home to skip after dark. A tourist who has walked somewhere once and come back unharmed has one data point. A man who lives there has all of them. Nothing happened to us. It really was one of the best afternoons of the trip. But I might not take that walk again without asking somebody first.

Pizza

That evening we went out again — up Main Road this time, ninety meters or so, no crossing required — to Posticino, which is an Italian place at 323 Main Road that has been feeding Sea Point for a very long time. I had a pizza. After ten miles I would like to tell you it was the best pizza in Africa. It may have been. I was in no condition to judge. Bonnie had a Greek salad, I think. I would not swear to the salad. I would swear to the way she looked at the pizza.