Something felt quite wrong about walking up the expansively wide brick path of The Company’s Garden from Wale Street to Annandale Street on my way to a luxuriously indulgent high tea at the Mount Nelson. Lingering on the regularly placed park benches and passed out on the manicured green lawns were dozens of homeless, begging blacks still misplaced from the long gone apartheid era.  Thread bare clothes, digging in waste bins for scraps of food, and so dirty that the smell of one I passed made me retch.  Their poverty instantly making me feel guilty about my impending splurge.

To torment my conscious further, I was suddenly drawn towards a series of photographs interspersed amongst the tree lined path – a temporary outdoor exhibition entitled Food (R)evolution (www.foodrev.net). Photo after photo, I was being challenged about the vast differences in available food sources from the average Westerner, compared to many individuals throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.  One panel showed six different families from Stellenbosch posed in front of their weekly shopping.  The poorest black family recently just located to a home in the area from a Cape Town township was surviving on rice and tinned red beans and an allowance of merely 170 Rand (US$10). In the far bottom right corner was a white family, with a spread that looked very similar to what I’d normally have in my own kitchen.  Their weekly budget was 1150 Rand (US$68). Another panel showed a Himba tribeswoman of Namibia, sitting in the dirt, her bare breasts exposed along with her meager two smalls bowls of dull white cornmeal porridge made with sour milk which she ate twice a day.  Contrasting these harrowing images where those of obese Americans.  One so heavy, that he is bound to his home and needing to loose 100 pounds before he can be considered for the controversial stomach stapling procedure.  And then the shocking statistics:  There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet still 1 billion people do not have enough food.  And equally worrying is that obesity is now killing more children than hunger.

Contemplating Western obesity, starving Africans, the effects of climate change on food production, and the limited companies now controlling the world’s food supply was an odd way to set the scene prior to my afternoon of sugar-filled decadence. 

Luckily the ‘exhibition’ only ran half-way up the path, and I soon turned my attention to the squirrels frolicking in the bushes and dashing in front of me after a fallen acorn; their cheekiness renowned in the tourist guidebooks.  The homeless thinned out too, and I was left with a peaceful stroll up the remaining distance awed by the old white colonial buildings, my favorite being the broad facade of the Art Gallery. Eventually I was spurted out the other end with the sky high white pillars and grand entrance of Mount Nelson in front of me.  On a normal day, the expanse of Table Mountain usually provides an imposing backdrop, but not today.  The infamous ‘tablecloth’ had shrouded it from view and there was just a wall of misty grey clouds.

Stepping across the threshold, I was suddenly transported into another world of palm-lined boulevards, tennis courts, rolling lush green lawns, and oversized outdoor sculpture. The Mount Nelson, which opened in 1899, was at the time described in its first advertisement as “ A large and splendid hotel, beautifully situated in the Gardens at the Top of Government Avenue, in the most Airy and Healthy part of Cape Town,” It didn’t seem that much had changed. There were three areas, of varying degrees of formality, in which you can be served high tea at the Mount Nelson.  As inviting as the the formal inside was with it’s mint green and white baroque sofas, I opted for the semi-formal covered terrace.  It suited my mood better that day.  The third area, the outdoor terrace, would have been lovely on a bright summer’s day, but with the rain looming looked rather uninviting.

With a piano in the distance playing lilting tunes, I took my seat. Laid before me was a simple setting.  A single protea steam, the South African national flower, in a low vase. Before long, Wilson, my black waiter, came to take my tea order and explained that inside was a buffet of deserts that I could visit at my leisure as much as I liked. He’d bring out my tea and savories shortly. Like a kid unleashed in a candy store, I made no delay in making my way to the array of miniature sweets.  There must have been over 20 delicacies to choose from.  With restraint I selected a dizzying array including a cake pop on a stick, carrot cake, peanut butter cookie, a chocolate and expresso dome, something that looked like a mini donut, and two local specialities a Hertzoggie (which I didn’t like) and a ‘melk’ tart, which tasted of a wafer thin pastry cup filled with custard and topped with a hint of cinnamon.

Before long the two-tiered tray of savory delights arrived.  The bottom featured Cape Malay inspired canapés.  A creamy mushroom samosa.  A pinwheel of sweet potato, pumpkin seeds with a hint of cumin. The top was reserved with the more traditional British affair.  Smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich. Welsh rarebit on crostini. And a South African inspired sandwich layered with white cheddar cheese and topped with shredded biltong. And then the scones arrived.  A highlight and necessity for any tea for me. Disappointedly, the cream was whipped and not clotted and the buns fluffier than my beloved British versions.

Sipping my South African ‘champagne’, feeling my blood sugar surge, and watching my tummy bulge, I instantly slipped into an alter world, a different reality.  With all the waiters black, and all the dinners white, one could almost feel like they were back in colonial times when coloureds were mere servants.  In some ways, it didn’t feel like anything had changed.  The scene was heightened by the aristocratic older couple sitting by the door to my right.  The lady, in her pompous British accent inquired frustratingly to Wilson, “Where are our scones?”  Wilson, in his unflappable servitude responded, “Madam, they are on their way.  We are making them fresh just for you.”

In that instant, I was suddenly reminded of a page in the menu at Lady Bonin’s tea pallor that I’d visited a few days before.  Drinking tea involves seven senses: Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste, Sound, Mind and Spirt.  The overwhelming benefit of traveling solo is that on your own you have the absence of talk to let you explore all these areas. (Plus you don’t feel as self-conscious about loading your plate, several times, with cakes.) It made me reflect on the randomness of life. I had often reflected on my travels how fortunate I had been to have been born in the family I had been.  Why did I get to be brought into a world with white skin and a Western background during a prosperous century? How come I wasn’t born a starving Ethiopian child whose parents died from AIDS before I could even know them. It is pure chance that determines our varying, dramatically different life fortunes.  In the middle of my deep reflection, I was brought back to the present with a white maitre d asking me ‘Is everything okay with your tea madam.’  He reminded me that things were changing in South Africa, if every so slowly.

Walking back through The Company Gardens after my tea, I was approached by a colored homeless man, scarred skin over where his left eye should have been.  He could see my apprehension and offered to stay some distance from me whilst we talked.  He wanted to walk with me and discuss the photo exhibit and what I thought it meant.  Before long, we were engaged in a half-hour thought provoking, deep conversation about life. We talked about how we must forget the past to move forward. We talked about how we must forgive. His own empty eye socket had come about as the result of his brother-in-law stabbing him in the eye on Christmas Day 10 years ago, but how he’d forgave him.  We talked about reincarnation and those incomprehensible moments when you meet a stranger and go ‘I know you.’  We talked about his dreams, how in the future he wanted to be a real estate agent.  During our conversation, he must have sensed my incomprehension about how the two of us ended up in such different situations.  He was very pragmatic, “Some of us must live this way.” Meaning his life was there to teach me something about mine.  He continued, “I am just one of many angels in the street you will meet on your path through life.”

Our talk helped resolve some of my earlier internal conflicts about the disparities in world wealth, but then left me wondering the rest of the evening why do we meet the people that we end up meeting in life?  As it was, I was back in Cape Town this time around simply to spend a week with an English guy I had met by pure random chance on Camp’s Bay Beach less than a year ago around this same time of year.  We had instantly connected, stayed in regular contact (although having just chatted for an hour or so and nothing else that day) and without reason, and probably sense, had decided it might be a fun adventure meet up again in this far flung Southern tip of Africa. A  bracelet from Cole Jewelry in Woodstock that I’d bought the day before had come with the following quote “An invisible thread connects those who we are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance…”  It had deeply resonated with me. What was I doing here in Cape Town?  Why had a random encounter on a beach a year ago brought me back? What did my friend, Heinrich Kladie, whom I’d just met, have to teach me?

I began checking my watch regularly.  Dusk was coming.  Like Cinderella, whose carriage turned into a pumpkin at midnight, I was anxious of getting back to my own ‘home’ before dark.  Sadly, Cape Town was still not a safe place to be wandering the streets on your own after dark as a white woman. Senseless, random murders for a few hundred rand are still rife, apparently, if you listen to the stories of locals and the news. Heinrich sensed my nervousness of that and of the two additional homeless men that were now following us. “Don’t you worry miss.  I will protect you.  They won’t do anything to you with me here.”  He walked me to the safety of the other side of the street.  I wanted to give him some money, but sensed that he would have been insulted by gesture.  Instead he offered, without me saying anything, “You write.  You go back to your countries (referring to American and Britain).  You tell people that not all black South Africans are bad.  You tell them how nice a place Cape Town is to be.  That is all I ask.”  With a shake of the hand, he dashed back across the road to find someplace dry to stay the night in The Company’s Gardens.

Much later, I was still sifting through in my head the meaning of all that had transpired in those four hours.  I decided that maybe I’m not meant to understand.  Maybe some connected threads are too tangled in this incarnation to unravel.