On an early spring morning, I open wide the sliding doors of my room at Cape Town’s Ellerman House, a hillside hotel above the Atlantic. From the balcony, I watch as low clouds and ghostly mists whisk across the bluest of skies. I don’t know why the color of the sky is so much richer and deeper in Cape Town, on the very southernmost point of the African continent, but it most definitely is, almost to the point where it’s lapis lazuli rather than blue.
Below the balcony, somewhere just beyond my line of vision, the wild surf of the Atlantic hammers the South African shoreline in endless, thunderous waves, its echoes both enchanting and soothing. Out beyond the surf, massive freighters and ships dot the ocean, quietly gliding away to unknown, distant lands.
The wind is cold, dredged from depths of the Antarctic, the closest landmass to South Africa other than Africa itself, but it’s bearable with the light sweater I’m wearing. I watch seabirds in flight punctuate the cloud-smeared sky, struggling against steep ocean winds but always winning the battle.
