Several months ago, my wife and I made the decision to emigrate to Cape Town - from Durban. Looking back, through the haze of a Merlot fog, it's hard to remember why. It might have been because we've always wanted to go to San Francisco - Cape Town's a more realistic approximation for the budget-conscious.

Or it could have been that last, splinteringly hot Durban summer, which melted Indian Mynahs on their branches and felt akin to living inside an equatorial warlord's armpit. Ten years of weeping sweat and battling mozzies, while we waited for Durban to 'explode' finally sent us over the edge. Or…oh wait- I got a job offer. That was the final push, really. Something concrete to go to. This reassured me.

'Think of the current rate of the Arctic melt'
I had once wandered off to England with no job waiting; just a satchel full of big ideas, little clue and three crisp travellers' cheques. After sheltering from football hooligans under my 70's era desk in Reading for a year, surviving on pillaged pork pies, I had come back with none of my ego and half of my money, crawled back into the warlord's armpit and decided never to go anywhere again. It was too dangerous out there. Durban was warm and soupy; safe. So I was surprised to discover that there we were, sometime in March, barrelling over Sir Lowry's Pass in a lopsided Citi Golf full of books and Flings packets. Somehow, we had extricated ourselves from the syrupy flypaper of Durban lassitude (of course, without a spirited wife at my shoulder I would still have been um-ing and aah-ing). As we careened down towards Somerset West, our vision filled with the golden vista of an untrammeled future, where we could start over again - then it filled with a mauve Ford Cortina that had lost a tyre and was now swimming alarmingly across four lines of rush hour traffic, before it ploughed gracelessly into the median, followed closely by ourselves. A warning, perhaps, not to rush the future. We brushed the chip crumbs off and continued cautiously on towards our new home; a flat we had never even seen. It turned out to be a tiny one-bedroom in uber-trendy, smooth-as-silk Wembley Square, which drank up the setting sun like a starving pelican. We dashed inside to stand on our (first ever) balcony – which at several centimetres wide was really the tiniest suggestion of a balcony; only our eyelashes fitted. Still, we had a glowing view of Lion's Head, you didn't have to swim through humidity, and we'd probably end up in Top Billing magazine just by living here.

We collapsed on a blow-up mattress for three weeks, then woke up and decided to make some friends. We had heard that this might be hard in Cape Town. "They take a while to warm up", said one Doubting Thomas.

Perhaps we were simply trying to hard?
"Think of the current rate of the Arctic melt." Unfazed, we invaded the downstairs sushi bar and made friendly gestures in the general direction of some super models, but they weren't interested and slithered away through a crack in the flagstones. So we decided to trek to the summit of Lion's Head, where we might find a hiked-out captive audience who'd have to humour us - but the peak was full of joggers who came and went in a blur of Lycra, pausing for two seconds to send an MMS to friends in Sweden. We shuffled over to Observatory and made several new friends quite easily, on a street corner - but they had a tendency to talk in tongues and ferret about in our pockets when we weren't looking. Finally we picked a spot on the map and ended up at the famous Hout Bay World of Birds. One thing about animals, they're less picky. Not much use for a game of pool, but companionship? Fireside chat? No worries. We dashed past the world's smallest guinea pig, a sort of furry tennis ball, then under a screaming parrot and into the monkey garden, where real squirrel monkeys sit on your shoulder and nibble your ears. It's a phenomenon - as exhilarating as swimming with Californian dolphins, but again, happily for us, cheaper. However, they must have been in an uncharacteristic funk that day, because of the tourists pressing cameras in their little faces. One weed on my shoulder (a monkey, not a tourist), then another went for my wife's hair clip like it was the winning lottery ticket. A little Japanese boy laughed at us. We decided to try something safer and ventured into a peaceful, shady enclosure where a one-legged owl and a dusty Hadedah sedately watched us from a dark corner. I fell to the ground in the name of kinship and the Hadedah immediately started attacking my shoelaces, possibly out of some instinctive nest-building frenzy. Nothing personal, you understand. The Maribou storks, then. I knelt down, close to the fence and immediately learned my lesson. One tried to poke its beak in my eye (luckily I had glasses on). Perhaps I had been too louche, joking about it looking like a mumm's elbow – plus I was behaving like a tourist's camera. I wandered through some greenery muttering at my stupidity – and was amazed to come upon a sort of mini-kangaroo, about a foot in length, which I tried to befriend. It hissed in exactly the tone of an aggravated Puff Adder. I scrabbled backwards and found myself under a majestic Korean owl, which turned its head away in obvious annoyance. Perhaps we were simply trying to hard? It was time to opt for the safer territory of Facebook.

I instantly made 150 'friends' and settled down to play Playstation for a year: mission accomplished. Job, check. Friends, check. We had adapted well to our new environment and were even regulars at the local library, which was full of Catholic priests and sighing civil engineers, oddly enough.

Everything felt "oddly enough", actually, from the roads as wide as footpaths to the booming cannon that went off every midday. The cannonballs, someone told me, were designed to plop into the bay and keep SA's sleek new submarines in practice. It was a sort of game. "Gosh", I said, "really?" Being in Cape Town, we absolutely had to do some celebrity spotting. Just in one morning of shopping at Gardens Centre, we tagged Pieter Dirk Uys, David Kramer, Toby Cronje - and my wife thought she saw Patricia Lewis. John Malkovich proved harder to track down; a friend of mine who mans a designery store full of little Japanese books and retro Adidas shoes said that Malkovich had been in, wearing "some sort of kaftan thing".

One Thursday the grapevine went to Def Con 4: Danny Glover was ambling around on Robben Island and Meg Ryan was at the Convention Centre filming a rom com. We were torn. We decided to split the difference and blag our way into the Mount Nelson around the corner; on the off chance we might see Mags van der Westhuizen. They're always so gracious to guests at the Mount Nelson , even if you look a little grubby. One morning in winter, I was woken by a gang of seagulls taunting a rollerblader and suddenly realised: I hadn't thought about the rest of South Africa – or even the rest of the world – for quite a while. Wasn't that strange?

We had uprooted ourselves out of a fabric of family and friends whom we had known for years, left the green hills of our childhood, driven 1 600km South West, and simply - adapted. It must be some form of denial, I decided, while sipping my morning cappu at Vida Café, black polo neck scoffing at the light lashings of winter rain. Hey, I thought – when did I start wearing polo necks? It was the mountain's fault, of course. Love it, hate it, sell it to Europe and make a mint in sandstone sales; but I do think there is something scientifically odd about the mountain. It's as if, once under its massive shadow, all of your thoughts of home – be that Maritzburg, Zimbabwe or NYC, simply bounce back at you, like cell messages when the network's busy. You walk around in a fog, gawping at the beauty of the scenery, and somehow forget the continuing reality of the world you left. You forget thunderstorms, litter and CNA's – three things we've seen very little of in the Cape . Of course, there’s also the unique climate to blame for this involuntary amnesia. It's easy to imagine you're in the Med, when the mountains, the sea and the flora all try to convince you of the fact, and there are Top Billing presenters floating past on yachts of the month. Resolute, I made a mental note to phone our friends in Durban and re-connect. This Alice in Wonderland feeling was freaking me out.

Then I looked up to see a white cloud unfurling over Devil's Peak and my mind went all fluffy and pink again. Us immigrants to the city bowl, of course, knew deep inside that there was a wider world out there; we'd seen it. It was full of real problems. We just couldn't really see it anymore, past the mountain. Slowly but surely, we were becoming voluntary ostriches; nestled obliviously on a peninsula that may as well be adrift in the Atlantic.
 

Source: News24.com - www.news24.com

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