11/24/06

Thoughts \ Developed Thoughts \ Rants \ Raves \ Writing

06/16/2005 11:33 +0200 GMT

3½ Beach and Camp's Bay, Cape Town

With the sun shining high and to my right, I breathe the beautiful smell of home, the salt and the Sea. A cool breeze, gulls calling, twin blue buckets on posts, 10 meters apart, bins for trash...rounded rocks, soft waves, clean air, long, thick eel-like lengths of some sort of sea grass, thick as your arm and longer than you are tall. 

Cape Town is a beautiful place, but there is a strong undercurrent of violence and danger in most places - not here on 3 ½ Beach, but nearly every other corner of the place. High walls built into cliffs, iron and steel bars, rusted razor wire defying the salt air to some degree, plaques warning of armed response, and the use of natural geography all are designed to keep the human animal out of reach of the affluent locals and tourists. This place has some homes that make Laguna mansions look like shacks. There's an extraordinary home built on huge legs, jutting out high on a mountain called Lion's Head, overlooking the Atlantic. It looks like a huge white spider, black windows its eyes, and its flat body recessing back into the hill, the house of someone whose wealth must be enormous.

Camp's Bay, south of Cape Town, on the water, is a small village similar to home-home. Nice waves, cool breeze, bright sun, cafés on the sidewalk, with resting cyclists and locals in their shades, all having a light lunch in the sun, served by tall, slender beautiful people. There's a football pitch (It's either a soccer field or a football pitch, is that right?) behind, with a view of the ocean. I can imagine if I were a kid growing up here, that playing soccer would have supplanted playing hoops at Main. Play some sports and soak in the waves, with a backdrop of bikinis, perfect waves...idyllic.