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Beguiling: adjective, “charming or enchanting, often in a deceptive way”.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Cape Town is like a siren on the rocks, catching sailors’ attention from afar with stunning mountainscapes, lush beaches, and delicious food smells, only to reveal the ugliness of load shedding, deep systematic racial segregation and inequality, devastating crime, and hardship.

Ag Jaaa, as Africa Melane, local radio personality and vice-chairman of the Cape Town Opera, says in the CNN article calling the Mother City “beguiling”; “I don’t think you’ll find very many ‘rainbow nation’ happy people in South Africa right now”.

That might be true, especially considering the newfound challenges with the cost of living crisis, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t ample opportunity for visitors and fortunate locals to still have a whale of a time in parts of the city.

Beginning with a quick dive into our long and sordid history, CNN notes Cape Town as “the embodiment of multicultural South Africa”, a result of the slave trade which brought people from Indonesia, Malaysia and Madagascar to its shores:

Locals of all backgrounds are on hand to talk up its incredible food and drink scenes and its access to some of the planet’s finest wild landscapes, without ever flinching from the important work of reminding newcomers just how this place came to be and the challenges it’s facing right now.

Lest we forget the atrocities of Apartheid, the travel writer lets Karen Dudley, the restauranteur who ran The Kitchen in Woodstock before the COVID-19 pandemic closed its doors, exhibit all the local delicacies of the Bo-Kaap – “arguably the apotheosis of modern Cape Town” – while explaining how her own family were once forcibly removed from the De Waterkant side as the area was declared a white’s only suburb.

Then the writer moves to the sea, letting Hanli Prinsloo, a champion free diver, showcase the “meditative calm” in the “world beneath the waves that crash into the city’s beaches”.

Noting how the city “derives so much of its identity from the water”, the writer goes on to explain how Cape Town is facing “serious environmental issues that plague this special habitat”, speaking about plastic pollution primarily.

While that is a real issue, the article misses the more poignant problem plaguing our seas at the moment, the sewerage leaks wreaking havoc at our best beaches.

Of course, there is also a neat segue into the Winelands, where Rose Jordaan, the owner of the Plaisir Wine Estate sees growing here as “a legacy project”.

Music also comes up as a major part of the Mother City’s identity, with the aforementioned Melane expressing how opera holds the country: “The operatic format of expression is centuries old. It’s ultimately telling a story. You’re just doing it in the most complicated, complex and wonderfully rewarding ways.”

“Cape Town aspires to be a city in line with the greats”, finishes Melane, comparing us to London and New York but differentiating how Cape Town is and always will be very much “rooted in African spirit, value and treatment”.

It just so happens to be quite beguiling.

[source:cnn]