Chapter 18

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

Mumbai, India

November 18

After a few fitful hours of sleep at the Johannesburg Airport Holiday Inn, we staggered back to the gate at 5:00 A.M. and took one more crack at flying to Port Elizabeth. The third try was a charm, and nearly twenty-four hours after our first attempt, we finally set down in the somewhat unlovely Indian Ocean port. We rented a van and drove straight out of town onto the four-hundred-mile coastal road to Cape Town. This two-lane highway is called the Garden Route—and although that name conjures up prim country flower patches—it’s actually a wild winding road slung between the mountains and the sea.

Most Americans, when asked to name the most stunning stretch of coastline in the world, will chauvinistically invoke Big Sur or the rockbound coast of Maine, but for sheer drama, neither compares with South Africa’s southern coast. Here, the Tsitsikamma Mountains cast towering shadows over breathtaking precipices, white beaches, and pristine tide pools. Dolphins, sea otters, and sei whales abound, and long stretches of virgin seashore are unsullied by the hand of man. After seeing rugged Storms River, sweeping Plettenberg Bay, and a stunning four-acre field of blooming lavender, Devi and I concluded that this craggy southern nub of Africa is probably the most magnificent spot on the face of the earth.

About halfway to Capetown, we wandered off the coast road and drove into a dry grassy valley known as the Little Karoo. This valley has long been the best place in the world to raise ostriches. In the decades prior to World War I, when ostrich feathers were tout le rage amongst fashionable European women, the Little Karoo enjoyed a remarkable prosperity, and huge mansions known as “feather palaces” sprung up on the streets of its largest town, Oudtshoorn. When fashions changed, the region slumped, but lately there’s been renewed international demand for ostrich leather and lean ostrich meat, so the Little Karoo is experiencing something of a renaissance.

Every pasture on the road to Oudtshoorn was occupied by flocks of gawky six-foot-tall birds. Every restaurant in town featured ostrich salad, ostrich burgers, and ostrich stew, and all of the souvenir shops along Hoog Street hawked ostrich-skin wallets, purses, and belts—not to mention huge, decorated ostrich eggs.

Although Oudtshoorn seemed nearly deserted, we had the good fortune to meet a handsome family of commercial ostrich farmers who had three dozen newly hatched chicks in the back of their Land Rover. They let Kara, Willie, and Lucas pet and cuddle the spotted foot-high birds to their hearts’ content. Then we drove out to the Highgate Ostrich Show Farm, where we learned everything we wanted to know, and then some, about ostrich farming. (No, they don’t actually stick their heads in the sand.) Kara held an ostrich egg fresh from the nest. Willie stood atop another egg to demonstrate its strength, and both kids mustered the courage to ride a big skittish bird around an ostrich corral.

When we looped back to the Garden Route, we drove past pin-neat Dutch colonial farms at the foot of the sweeping Langeberg Ridge and stopped in at the gorgeous coastal villages of Mossel Bay and Hermanos where pods of dolphins surfed the waves and spouting whales migrated to the west one after another. Few things on earth could command Kara’s attention like surfing dolphins. In fact, the scene was so spellbinding that we lost all track of the time. When I finally glanced at my watch, I noticed how late it was.

“Hey, Devi,” I said. “Aren’t we supposed to be off the road by sunset because of the bandits?”

“Yea?”

“Well it’s close to five now, and we’re still more than a hundred kilometers from Cape Town. We better get going.”

“We’ll get there in time,” said Devi, “as long we don’t end up in downtown Cape Town after dark, there’s nothing to worry about.”

An hour later, the sun was setting in a blood red sky, and we still weren’t anywhere near Cape Town. We had less than a quarter tank of gas left, and it seemed clear that we wouldn’t make it to our hotel by nightfall. At that point, the minutes turned into hours, and we clenched our teeth every time a car full of young men passed us. The only precaution left to us was to make sure we skirted central Cape Town, and headed straight for our suburban hotel. Needless to say, I managed to lead us off the highway smack in the middle of downtown. By that time, it was completely dark, the streets were nearly deserted, and we had only a limited conception of where we were and how to get to our hotel. At least the children were asleep.

“We better pull over and look at the map,” said Devi.

“Bad idea,” I replied. “We already look like complete tourists. If we turn on the light, and spread out the map, we’ll attract too much attention.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” asked Devi, nervously raking her eyes across the shadowy streets. “Just drive around ’til we find the hotel by accident?”

“Try to look like you know where you’re going,” I said. “And leave some room between us and the car in front of us in case we run into carjackers. I’ll use this little penlight to look at the map under the dashboard.”

That proved difficult, and we wandered the dark streets of central Cape Town for nearly twenty minutes. In those moments, fear begot fear. We recalled every gruesome crime story we’d heard in the last few weeks. Our pulses quickened every time a car pulled up behind us, and we framed every group of men loitering on a street corner as potential carjackers and rapists. Eventually, we stumbled into the residential Sea Point district. There, behind South Africa’s usual high walls and iron gates, we found our hotel. We identified ourselves to the guard and pulled into the parking lot with a huge sense of relief.

The fact of the matter is we never really knew whether we were in danger or not. Practically everyone we met in South Africa—black or white—told us, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of city centers at night. For the children’s sake, at least, we felt compelled to follow that advice. But no one in central Cape Town actually threatened us in any way. I’m sorry to report that after only two weeks in this country, we’ve heard so many lurid crime tales that we’re nearly as fearful (and race conscious) as the South Africans themselves. Devi says getting lost in a South African city at night was the most frightening aspect of our trip to date. Given our paranoid state of mind, I would tend to agree, but I have no evidence, one way or the other, whether that paranoia was justified or not.

By now, you’re probably sick of hearing about how beautiful the landscape is in South Africa. So just add Cape Town and environs to the list. Towering Table Mountain; lovely Camps Bay; glorious sunsets over the convergence of the Indian and Atlantic oceans; the endless convoy of ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope; the wild, natural Cape itself; the gorgeous eighteenth-century wineries of the Stellenbosch; the tastefully developed Victoria and Alfred Waterfront—the entire area is sublime.

Well, not the entire area. The cultured pulchritude of Cape Town and its pristine white suburbs pose a stark contrast to the squatter camps that line the N2 highway east of Table Mountain. As we drove out of Cape Town one day on our way to a spectacular country estate²², we passed the black townships of Crossroads and Khayelitsha. These destitute black communities encompass thousands upon thousands of tiny cardboard and corrugated-metal shacks that line the highway for nearly twenty kilometers. The Cape Town guidebooks only mention these neighborhoods in passing, but it would take a great deal of steely determination to ignore them.

“Look at that,” I said to Kara and Willie as we drove past the endless succession of pitiful hovels. “Look carefully, and remember how some people have to live in this world.”

Kara and Willie did gaze out the window for a while, but after miles of monotonous squalor, their eyes glazed over, and their minds wandered. When I called their attention back to the slums, Kara said, “Why do we have to keep looking at that. It’s just a buncha run-down shacks.”

“Because,” I replied, “unless you really see these squatter camps and realize that children your age live there without any electricity, heat, or running water—sometimes without any food—then you’ll never understand that most of the world isn’t like Marin County. And if you can imagine what it’s like to live in one of these metal shacks, then you’ll be thankful for your blessings, and maybe you’ll try to help people who aren’t as lucky as you are.”

“I appreciate what I have,” Kara said defensively, “and I don’t really see what I can do to help all the people who live in those shacks.”

“There isn’t much you can do now,” I replied. “But sometime in the future, you might be able to help—with the way you vote, or the way you give money to charity, or the way you live your life, generally.”

Kara looked at me skeptically. “So what do you do to help the poor people?”

“Well, we give money to charity, and I volunteer at the food bank, but basically, we could do more. I hope you’ll do better, when you grow up.”

Kara didn’t really buy into the whole sermon at that particular moment, and she only showed a passing interest in our subsequent discussion of apartheid. But I don’t think that anyone of her impressionable age could see all those brutally poor shantytowns without some lasting effect. At the end of the day, I’m glad we didn’t leave South Africa without showing Kara and Willie these sprawling slums—even if it was only at fifty miles per hour from the highway. For five months, we’ve trotted the kids through some of the loveliest places on earth, and it was good for them to see the other side of the coin.

As things turned out, it wasn’t really necessary to hammer the kids over the head with the South African squatter camps. That’s because twenty-four hours later, we had left southern Africa behind, flown across the Indian Ocean and set down in Mumbai, India. Mumbai—once known as Bombay—may be the best place on earth to show children the chasm between poverty and wealth. As anyone who’s been there will tell you, India doesn’t maintain the same serviceable separation of rich and poor we have in the West. And the moment we stepped off the plane, we were thrust into a world where the haves and have-nots lived cheek-by-jowl in pitiless gut-wrenching contrast.

To our complete delight, and totally without warning, Devi’s father, Pete, flew all the way from Sardinia to greet us at Mumbai Airport. Being Indian, he wanted to make sure we had a pleasant stay in his native land, and being a proud bopuji, he wanted to show off his grandchildren to his Bombay clan. Pete and his gracious brother, Dipu—a long-time Mumbai resident—brought two cars to the airport to pick us up. As we walked through the car park, we enjoyed a wonderful family reunion. In fact, we were so busy catching up, we didn’t realize that Kara and Willie were lagging far behind us.

When I finally looked back, I saw Kara dragging her suitcase thirty yards back. Suddenly, she was accosted by a tiny dark-skinned beggar girl dressed in rags. The girl was probably six or seven years old, but she was so small from malnutrition that she looked younger. On her hip she held her little brother—an emaciated boy of two or three with a dirty face, and open sores. Between them, they couldn’t have weighed fifty pounds.

The girl held out her shriveled brown hand toward nine-year-old Kara, mutely begging with enormous black eyes. Kara, who is invariably generous, was all alone, and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have any money to give, but she didn’t want to ignore the little girl, or turn away. They stood face-to-face for several seconds—two feet and an entire world between them. Still, they seemed to recognize each other as little girls. Finally, Dipu, who undoubtedly sees a thousand beggars a day, walked over and gently shooed the little mendicants away. When we climbed into the car, I was prepared to discuss the incident with Kara, but from the look on her face, I knew that was unnecessary.

²² This horse property, called Broadlands, was owned by a wonderful local character named Patricia O’Neill. The Hon. Mrs. O’Neill, legendary for her kindness and generosity, adopts orphaned and injured animals. She practically floored the children when she came to the door with a baby baboon on her hip—wearing diapers.