The 1time company plane lands in Cape Town. I come from Johannesburg. I'm coming home, a house that blends. It's dark and cold does winter expected for a meeting as I left the 1 August, asleep (September is almost). I said the name of the airline in the first line of text; I mentioned it because it is the Africa symptom that return: is a low-cost. It is the only, flymango also operates in South Africa. In countries where I come from an airplane is a luxury item, intended only for those who wear leather on your feet. Here you can take a plane for 50 euros and fly to the other corner of the country. An example is the huge development gap that exists between this place and all the other countries they've traveled this past year and a half. One more, there also tolls, asphalt roads perfect, cinemas, many bars design in which sips, stores where prices are not negotiable ... That is the Cape Town to which I return; the other, diametrically opposite, not so far.
believe to go visiting a corner of the first world beggars dotted invisible leaving sewers
Me viene looking for a friend, Gustavo, and got on his new silver sports and take the road that leads to the glossy city that provides shade of Table Mountain. On the road, left and right, reflects the small township of scattered light (ghettos). Since the car is impossible even to get a clue of the extent and condition of life in which millions of people hiding behind a fence first tin and wood houses, without toilets, Waterless. The row is infinite, but not seen. Many who come to this beautiful city just sense the difference, but they never behold and believe to go visiting a corner of the first world beggars dotted invisible leaving sewers, converted into a dance hungry zombies and alcohol. They come from poverty in the slums of the low cost of living is, always at risk. No plane, almost bare.
Is the worst place in the world?
Says the Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski sobre Sudáfrica, conference in his book "The cynics are useless for this job", that "Whites still retain their great wealth, live prosperously in luxurious neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a crowd of blacks are confined obscene slums, huts in villages horrible, the worst places I have ever seen in the world ". The description is of a world authority on kicking this most inhospitable places of the globe. Do the worst places in the world? I certainly have not seen in my life, on this continent or other, the insulting conditions of life of South African township. For its size, by violence, diseases, precarious ... that there is observed. It may be also due to the proximity in which live both worlds. The Cape Town rich and poor are too large, both, and only one cement line separates decreases to disappear. Elsewhere the is a small affluent neighborhood away or surrounded by misery. Here are two great cities that look back.
The road to my house I used to retrieve the first feeling I had when I landed here for the first time in March 2010: Where is Africa? Cape Town is the living room of a house in which dust and dirt is when you look under the carpet and the chairs are removed. If nothing moves, hereinafter known. The duality of this beautiful and easy city in which to live is that misery spreads obscenely to do fogging in flaming red cars. "It is the city of the world in which most Ferraris are sold", A friend told me the Spanish consulate. Maybe it is, I have stumbled upon one almost daily.
African Irony
We arrived at my house. Rented for a price that still seems like a dream, 600 EUR, a duplex penthouse with views of the mountains and the sea. Probably in my life do not leave any shoes in a better balcony overlooking. From my windows no trace of cardboard houses overcrowded. Live with the "mine", stained glass in front of houses where hot water is irrigated pots. I'll take a beer to Winchester, a bar that might be in the best street in Madrid. Since its small terrace provides the Beach Road and Atlantic waves almost dot. I sit and watch an illegal parking is busy trying to earn some rand to monitor that vehicles stop there do not lose the enamel. Then maybe sleep in the park or somehow return to its invisible sewer. I finish my beer reunion and return to my house thinking: Where is Africa, I love the, in which herds of elephants cross you and you get lost in their markets? This is no longer my place and, however, is the only African city that I have crossed, to Maputo, where you could live permanently necessary stimuli for its cinemas, bars, shops and restaurants. Ironically low cost. The rest of Africa, yes that makes me crazy, is always a place where I step. Another irony difficult to understand.
