City lights

Yesterday I played a game I haven’t since childhood.

It was Jell-O, the car game also known as statue, where you sit rigid unless the car moves you and fall against windows and into neighbors’ laps. The terrain made for an especially challenging game. The road wound right and left on a cliff above the ocean. The waters below were those of legends—the Cape of Africa that sailors have feared for centuries. We had spent the last two weeks on these beaches studying for exams and examining the invertebrates in tidal pools.

On this drive, were headed back to Cape Town from a marine reserve called De Hoop—“the hope” in Afrikaans, for The Cape of Good Hope, a mountainous, rocky area with white dunes, zebra and southern right whales. The next morning, we would fly on a northward diagonal to Johannesburg and drive seven hours to Kruger: home. Life in the Cape, which included our mid-semester break of climbing mountains, surfing and nights out in Cape Town, was a life more similar to that I lived in the States.

When we first reached Pretoria in the middle of October, I had not seen a vehicle moving faster than 30 miles per hour in two months. The city, its traffic lights, crowds, Jacaranda trees in rows, hawkers, and strangers were, understatedly, over-stimulating. We spent two days there and in Johannesburg visiting museums before flying to Cape Town.

We had in some ways longed for the city while we lived in the bush; a chance to enter a room with our hair sleek and clean, our eyelashes coated in mascara and not red savannah dust. But by the time I adjusted to urban commotion enough to enjoy any of those small pleasures of civilization, I longed to return to Kruger again. I missed the comfortable sleep that comes only from breathing fresh air, waking up to a day of work outdoors, and how I hear hyenas who-whooing outside my window. I felt a strange sorrow being in the polished civilization that was Cape Town, a reminder that in December I would leave this country for busy roads and downtowns back home.

“Cape Town is not like the rest of Africa,” a South African classmate told me.

Cape Town was brilliant. I climbed into the mist to the top of Table Mountain, snorkeled with Cape fur seals, bar-hopped and watched surfers in Kalk Bay, but nothing about the city and the thrills it offered could rival how much better I felt a week later, when we stayed at a marine reserve and moved our mattresses into a field to sleep outside under stars.

My life at Duke is full of commotion and crowds. Though I miss many parts of it, I was reminded, when I went to Cape Town, that soon I would have to leave my life in the field. I was happy when our bus pulled into the Kruger gate, happy to see the savannah again, greener with the rains we’d missed in our month away.