Accidentally Magellan: South Africa

South Africa is a country where the sunset seems to arrive with a warning label. “Don’t be out after dark,” I was told repeatedly, usually with the grave expression normally reserved for approaching hurricanes, rabid dogs, or the discovery of a man-eating vampire colony. Eventually I began to wonder whether the entire country had somehow fallen victim to a nocturnal plague. Daylight was for sightseeing; darkness, apparently, belonged to criminals, and possibly Count Dracula. Yet by day South Africa was spectacular: mountains tumbling toward oceans, enormous skies, vineyards, beaches and wildlife seemingly determined to remind you that geography had been showing off. My first lesson was that travelling here required equal measures of curiosity and caution. My second was that everyone had an opinion about where you absolutely should not go.

Outside Cape Town, I climbed into a shark cage, which seemed like an odd way to improve one's odds of survival after spending several days hearing about the dangers of South African streets. The boat headed into cold Atlantic water, and soon I was staring through metal bars at great white sharks slicing through the green depths. The animals were magnificent rather than monstrous, and the experience had the peculiar effect of making every warning about terrestrial danger seem slightly ridiculous. Here, at least, the danger had the decency to announce itself with fins. On land, danger was apparently less cooperative. The cage bobbed beneath a sky of impossible blue while sharks cruised past, and for a while I forgot about crime statistics, locked gates and the approaching sunset. Then someone announced that we were heading back to shore, and civilization resumed its usual business of making me nervous.

The Garden Route provided a gentler introduction to the country, although “gentler” is relative when one is sitting on a bus for hours watching the landscape roll past. The road threaded through forests, hills and coastal towns, and every bend seemed to produce another postcard. South Africa possesses an irritating abundance of scenery, the sort that makes you resent the necessity of eventually looking at a timetable. Along the way I encountered the real luxury of travel: strangers who had no particular reason to talk to me but did anyway. There were jokes, recommendations, complaints about politics, stories about relatives and vigorous discussions about where to eat. It was on journeys like this that the country began to emerge as something more complicated than the collection of warnings I had been given before arriving.

Then came Jeffrey’s Bay, where the Atlantic was transformed into a playground of rolling surf. I had come to surf, or at least to perform the movements that vaguely resemble surfing when observed from a considerable distance. Jeffrey’s Bay has earned its reputation among surfers for good reason, and watching experienced riders glide along the waves made the activity look almost insultingly easy. My own attempts were considerably more educational. The ocean repeatedly reminded me that balance is not a human birthright. Still, there was something irresistible about sitting on a board in the water, looking back toward the shore and realizing that this was one of those places where travel becomes less about collecting landmarks and more about temporarily belonging to the landscape.

Durban was reached by air, partly because I had become increasingly suspicious of South Africa’s rural roads. Distances are enormous, road conditions vary, animals and pedestrians appear where one least expects them, and stories about robberies and hijackings have a way of making an innocent road trip sound like an audition for an action movie. Durban itself offered another lesson in security. Behind the palm trees and Indian Ocean breezes were heavily guarded gated communities, walls topped with electric fencing and security measures that suggested the residents expected the medieval siege to return at any moment. It was an uncomfortable contradiction: a beautiful coastal city whose architecture sometimes seemed designed around the assumption that everyone outside the gate was a potential threat.

Johannesburg produced perhaps the strangest chapter. I flew in rather than arriving overland and then arranged transport to a hostel outside the city. The advice was sufficiently alarming that the taxi was made to look less conspicuous, because apparently even getting into a car could become an exercise in operational security. Stories circulated about criminals targeting tourists, kidnappings and bandits, and suddenly the humble taxi had acquired all the atmosphere of an undercover intelligence vehicle. I was not entirely convinced that anyone was actually hunting me, but paranoia is wonderfully efficient: give a traveller enough warnings and he will begin regarding every intersection as a geopolitical crisis. Johannesburg itself was vibrant, sprawling and endlessly energetic, but it also carried the visible scars of inequality and insecurity.

And yet the people I remember most were not the criminals, the sharks or the ominous sunset. They were the hostel workers making beds, the cooks preparing breakfast, the bartenders remembering names, the restaurant staff balancing plates and wages, and the ordinary people who wanted nothing more exotic than a decent day's work. They were earning honest livings in a country wrestling with power blackouts, unemployment, inequality and rising crime, and they still found reasons to laugh with strangers. Load-shedding could plunge a restaurant into darkness, but someone would light a candle and keep serving dinner. The security gates could be intimidating, but hospitality remained remarkably open. South Africa, I discovered, could be frightening, exhausting and occasionally absurd—but it was also warm, funny and extraordinarily human. The warnings were real. So were the people who refused to let those warnings define their country.