PetesWeekly

After a few weeks in Cape Town I am a new man. I am also a guest in my home town, which is a very new perspective. Maybe that’s the price one pays for bringing a new girl along. (She’s four years old and awfully curious.)

I think that we forget what a treasure we have here:

• World of Birds in Hout Bay, the biggest assemblage of birds in Africa, along with an eclectic mix of  creatures from snakes to wallabies.
• Kirstenbosch
• Monkey World in Somerset West
• Table Mountain Cable Car
• Chapmans Peak
• Spier Estate and the Moyo Restaurant
• Strand on a winter afternoon warm enough to paddle. Back home the best you can do on a warm winter afternoon is walk across the frozen fjord.
• V&A Waterfront on any day.
• Countless outstanding eateries where even the worst compare well with anything affordable in Europe.
• And don’t get me started on the joys of the various wineries.

These are all world class experiences, yet most of us Cape residents take them for granted. We tell ourselves that they are for visitors. (These are folk who travel for 20 hours and invest a small fortune to get here. Yet we don’t appreciate these places enough to check them out this weekend.)

But here is the thing. As we get more connected to the world economy, and we ramp up our tourism resources, we too become roadkill when the world economy drops a few gears. Folk in Cape Town pretty much have the city to themselves this winter.

But, that’s not the real treasure in South Africa. The real treasure is the people who are open hearted enough to talk to you at the drop of a hat. Porters; parking attendants; concierges; the couple at the table alongside on their honeymoon who want to find out how to get to Cape Point; the old couple next door to them who not only know the way but share their honeymoon story which involves Stellenbosch, too much port and an aardvark. Before you know it you are friends with everyone.

This simply doesn’t happen in any other English speaking country I have visited. And the folk who don’t speak English can’t. I have visited 58 countries over the years, and have yet to find a group of folk who are as comfortable sharing as we South Africans.

Nei Boet, I hear you cry, as have most of the folk I have been braaing with lately. You’re just seeing the good stuff. There are undercurrents here almost as deep as the potholes in Gauteng.

Maybe. But therein lies the value of the Internet. It doesn’t matter where you actually live, you can build a life and a business online for a fraction of the cost and risk of a ‘real’ business.

I should know. I started doing it 11 years ago, and it supports me in the most expensive country on earth, where the summer temperature is the a few degrees lower than the temperature of the Cape in winter, with a lot more rain. (Another good reason to visit the coast in winter.)

Kirstenbosch is quite superb. And deeply peaceful after the M3 raceway on a Saturday morning.

Living abroad has given me a much wider perspective on issues technological, and I am afraid this spills over into issues social. May I share a simple thought?

I have lived as a local in the UK, Norway and Australia. This offers an insight you cannot get as a tourist. In each of these countries you cannot choose the laws you want to obey. It’s a all-or-nothing package. And there is no leeway for personal interpretation.

For instance, if the sign on the road says 40 km/h it is not a guideline. Get caught doing 42 km/h and the fine will be stiffer than the British monarchy. That’s points off your licence, and a payment that will keep you off beer for a long time. 50 km/h is enough to book your place at the local chooky.

These past few days I have been sticking to the speed limit. It’s good practice for when I get back to Oslo. But, frankly, it is terrifying being overtaken at high speed on both the right and the left, often at the same time. (Illegal.) By folk not wearing seatbelts. (Also illegal.) While having urgent discussions on their mobile phones. (Illegal as well.)

Yet, not one of these folk even thinks that they are part of the problem: All this illegal stuff they’re happy to tell tourists goes down in SA.

Twice yesterday on the N1 to Bellville, impatient BMWs in the fast lane crossed my middle lane into the slow lane to overtake me and and Lewis Hamilton (idling along at 150 km/h in thefast lane). In both cases, they missed my rear bumper by a mere fraction. In Norway kids are regarded as quite important, so protecting mine is a bit of a priority for me.

Having a BMW Z4 (German for you-will-survive) hitting my rented Nissan Tiida (Japanese for drive-fokken-carefully) would be a very bad thing for my family.

These are the same folk who sit around a table decrying the way SA standards have fallen. And judging by the anecdotes I hear, may be the same people who have no ethical challenge with waving a few buffalo-flavoured notes at the cop who stops them.

The reason Norway and England and Australia work as well as they do is that zero tolerance applies to everyone. And for everything, not just for the folk driving the gravy train. The folk in economy class assume that every one else cares as much as they do.

I sat in an Oslo restaurant a while ago, unhappy with life, and my wife. I pulled out an old notebook I had filled in at the Knysna Heads 8 years ago. As I read, I realised that my feelings were the same as I had felt in Knysna. And before that in Sandton 25 years ago. In each case I blamed my partner for the pain. I was wrong to do that. The problem was me.

And it is the same in SA as it is in any other country. The problem is not ‘them’, no matter how tempting it is to think so, or who they may be. The problem is us.

Learning is painful. I know this because I took up skiing this past weekend.

My wife assures me that I wasn’t too bad, but that slowing down is not often done by plowing one’s face into the track ahead, except in extreme emergencies. She also pointed out that screaming four letter words as one hurtles down the side of a cliff is frowned upon by Norwegians, who tend to be somewhat restrained. Especially when the cliff is, in fact, a mere 5 degree incline. Although she was inspired by my doing it all backwards, a feat that attracted quite a crowd.

Frankly, it all hurt more than I expected.

I was inspired to do this by my 13 year old son. He’d been forced into a 20km cross country ski run. (His previous attempt at skiing had been last winter.) I was 30 minutes early to collect him at the designated spot, just before lunch. It was a delight to see these youngsters cruising across the frozen lake, thighs rippling as they gracefully strode across the ice with ski sticks gripping the ice in unison.

Sadly, my son was not in this initial group. Nor the second. After about an hour one of the teachers who had accompanied the kids sidled up to me. “You are waiting for someone?” he asked in Norwegian. At least, I assumed that was the question. I mentioned my son’s name. His face dropped, in the way that your Dad’s does when he is about to tell you that your pet puppy has just been severely injured.

“Ah yes,” he said. “Kristoffer did not have it good. He has no technique. Normally we relax when we can go downhill, but he had to work just as hard to go down as to go up. He will be along, but maybe not soon.”

Kris’s second name is Thor, named after the God of War. When he proclaims “I am Thor!” it is not usually in pride, but rather in pain. And so it was on Thursday.

About 30 minutes later I saw a young man in the distance. Normally when one sees a skier striding across the snow it’s a proud event. If you’re a movie buff, phrases like “crouching tiger” and “lunging lion” spring to mind. This youngster was more of the genre “broken leg”. He shuffled his legs wantonly making slow progress across the level surface, and only occasionally falling over. His ski sticks hung limply from his arms, no longer quite as straight as when they’d left the factory. The left stick had an interesting hook to it that certainly was unusual. My son.

Actually, it wasn’t him, just a boy wearing the same colours and having a similar gait. My boy was still a few miles back, at the top of the last hill. Apparently it is not a good hill to come down if you are unskilled, as evidenced by one youngster who took a sudden left and vanished into a copse at the bottom, completely missing the frozen lake. This was accompanied by a outburst of “Oy, Oy,Oy” from the folk watching. This is a universal Norwegian sound for “Oh gosh, he’s about to die.”

Eventually, even the Norwegians lost patience and sent a vehicle up the hill to rescue the last three boys. Good thing, because it was getting close to supper time.

Now, I was never a great sports player at school. I made captain of the third hockey team, but that was a nominal title because we never had enough players to actually play a real match against another school. But, this sad showing led me to ask “Honestly, how difficult can this be?”

So, when Caroline nudged me on Saturday I was gung ho. Turns out that it is quite challenging. We’ve decided, the boy and me, that next winter will be a good time to ski again.