Cape Town

Cape Town made me think about cities and what can make them special - what can cause the casual visitor to say within the first few hours, "wow, it'd be amazing to live here". I've been lucky enough to see some of the great cities of the world, and I think what makes them stand out is usually a combination of the natural setting (so no credit to anyone except the founders) and a less easily defined human contribution - the architecture, the services, the level of courtesy towards strangers, the options for entertainment, culture and other activities, etc. Not all great cities have all of these (think of Manhattan - the architecture compensates for the rudeness; and in London the human/cultural contribution offsets a dull location) but the overall mix has to be right.

So - I'm hardly the first to say it, but Cape Town is one of the great cities of the world, above all for the setting. We all know about Table Mountain, which is certainly very striking, but what I didn't know was that the entire coastline is spectacular, and that the mountains are an integral part of the city itself - Signal Hill and Lion's Head virtually cut the city in half. Just south of Cape Town (which oddly enough faces north to the sea) is the wonderful and enormous Table Mountain National Park which extends some forty kilometres down to Cape Point. We went into the Cape of Good Hope section, which has miraculously been kept in a near-pristine state - there are no buildings except at Cape Point (which discreetly includes a funicular to get the lazy or less ambulatory to the top to see the views from the lighthouse) and as you drive around on the empty roads you see antelope grazing and groups of baboons wandering around (the baboons are in fact a menace - signs warn you not to bring out any food or you'll get a baboon mugging - and outside the Cape Point tourist shop we saw people being adroitly relieved of sandwiches and chocolate bars that they'd just bought; we hid ours under our coats and fled back to the car). In the park and in fact all around the Cape there are dozens of coves and beaches which are completely deserted in the winter - they probably get busy in the summer, but what was striking was that construction has been kept firmly under control in the small beach communities - we didn't see any high-rise apartment blocks or hypermarkets; it felt more like being in Norfolk or Brittany, rather than a few minutes drive from a metropolis of three million people.

Cape Town then scores big for managing to have fitted in to its glorious natural setting without spoiling it too much (though there are a few logo-emblazoned skyscrapers right in the centre - FNB and Absa, shame on you). My colleagues who live and work in CT say that it's also more of a cultural centre than Johannesburg, and it has a very good range of restaurants - so it has some of the advantages of a big city as well. It's also reputed to be - and feels - much safer than Johannesburg. In fact, it's better not to make comparisons, because Johannesburg comes out badly on any level, in my view. Cape Town is a beautiful city; Joburg only exists at all because of a seam of a certain type of metal ore underground, which hardly seems a good enough reason. I know where I'd rather live.