All That Lived and Breathed Underneath

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As someone who likes to travel fiercely to her own rhythm, I rarely sign up for the structured tour.  I like the freedom of going where I want, when I want; of stopping when I’m inspired to; or skipping altogether when I’m not moved or motivated to slow down. 

I don’t want to see a new place through the lens of someone else’s templated, standard agenda.  I want instead to harmonize all the nudges of my internal bearings – my mind, body, gut and soul – through my own intuition and through finding my own flow.  I am unabashedly and uncompromisingly selfish in this sense.  For I know when I travel locked into my own why, I connect to a place in the way I was always meant to. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t follow whim and wonder or lean on locals and experts.  It simply means I move, above all, by my internal compass.   

But I also know my limitations.

Driving on the other side of the road has always been a travel non-negotiable for me, as much here in South Africa, as it was months earlier in New Zealand.  Throw in cliffside driving, wine-tasting and the risks of parking a tempting, shiny rental car around Cape Town, as I had been informed of them, and I knew I had to turn to a local to help me navigate all the places I wanted to see.  Three weeks here would take me not only to Cape Town, the Mother City, but around the Cape, through three different wine regions and down to the whale-inhabited southern coast. 

Thanks to a good-old-fashioned Google search I found Allie.  I hired him for all the reasons I would come to so thoroughly enjoy him for.  His Tours by Locals profile exuded personality, a self-effacing humble charm and a genuine streak of unrelenting hospitality.  This meant all the more, sitting as it did atop a convincing collection of rave reviews from fellow travelers.

I knew I wasn’t getting an ego-fueled, canned script when Allie spoke.  I could tell he was sharing what he knew based on the unique shape of our one-of-a-kind encounter.  I am sure he had his talking points, but he engaged with them versus delivered them.  

He delighted in finding me dolphins and whales, baboons and ostriches, clear skies and rainbows.  He persisted in getting just the right shot, finding just the right look-out point, sharing just the right detail to turn a waterfall, bay or neighborhood into a more colorful, human story.

Never was this more evident than when he surprised me on our way to Franschhoek with a visit to the gates of Drakenstein Correctional Facility, once called Victor Verster prison.  The prison known above all else for releasing the most famous political prisoner in South African history.  Nelson Mandela.

As we approached, I leaned forward from the front seat fighting against the resistance of my seat belt.  At these gates thirty-six years ago now, Nelson Mandela completed his historic 27-year walk to freedom. 

I had goosebumps everywhere.  My eyes widened with the unexpectedness and tenderness of Allie’s gesture. A lump caught in the back of my throat as my head slowly shook back and forth in pure joy and gratitude.  I was smiling.

I never knew seeing this place was a possibility.   I never knew standing on this ground could be my reality. 

Somewhere along our drives earlier that week, I had shared with Allie that I’d read Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom.  I even shared that I was grateful I hadn’t made the trip back in 2020 when I originally planned to visit, because I wasn’t ready for any of it.  Allie and I had talked at length during our time together about life during and after Apartheid, about the ripple effects of it on the country’s policies, politics and poverty. 

While I wish for the sake of so many it wasn’t a lens I ever had to gaze through, I was grateful I could try and understand it through Allie’s lens. 

He was a wealth of knowledge about the Western Cape, its wildlife, its history, its must-see and must-do spots.  Walking alongside him in and out of restaurants and sites of interest, it was clear, too, he was an incredibly well-respected tour guide.  He’d been doing this for three decades, he told me.   He was an entrepreneur, a steward of the earth and nature,  and in the sweetest of ways, he was a proud, doting grandfather.

I couldn’t help but think as we drove into Franschhoek later that afternoon, that decades before some might have only reduced him to a man of color, Brown, of Indian descent.  That made the lump in the back of my throat return.

What a tragedy to judge this life based only on its skin and surface.  And how lucky had I been that Mandela took that walk so I could see and collide with all that lived and breathed gloriously just underneath.