Stepping Lightly By Roger Piantadosi Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 18, 1999; Page E01

Cape Town's Victoria and Albert Waterfront. Photo by Eric Miller

That would be your foreign accent.

It will make more of a difference to the natives, of every stripe, than the color of your skin or the name of your god. The whole world knows, of course, how far South Africa has come since legalized racism was thrown out of office in 1994; God knows, meanwhile, how hard it is to break ancient bad habits.

Once your accent or rental car or hired guide betrays you as a foreigner, you become, for the most part, comfortably exempt; the new South Africa is staking much of its future on tourists, and is especially hungry for the heretofore scarce American variety, which tends to spend more and stay longer than the European. But the process you're exempt from--a complicated array of prejudgments based on skin color, language, income, tribe--hasn't quite vanished into thin air since the rise of Nelson Mandela and majority rule. It's merely no longer legal. Many South Africans--a people whose internal math goes way beyond the simple division of black and white--still fail to see any good whatsoever in many other South Africans.

Just like in, you know. America. Except the light isn't quite as bright and unrelenting in America.

Thus after one of the world's longest flights from Miami or New York, you will find yourself in the middle of one of the world's most vast and breathtakingly beautiful . . . reengineering laboratories.

While Mandela's ministers and European, Asian and American business interests work out the real-world details of a post-apartheid economy, your strong foreign currency, like your accent, will insure that your stay will be comfortable, if not downright luxurious. (The rand is now about six to the dollar.) And the mental snapshots you bring back will recall not only the impossibly big skies and bush-level views of mountains, sea and open veld, but also your inevitable immersion in what has to be the most ambitious socioeconomic makeover in the history of the world. If South Africa was a special place before apartheid ended, it's that much more poignant, relevant and riveting now.

Oh, but . . . is it safe?

No, of course it's not safe--especially if you were leaning toward a week in Orlando, or a weekend in the rec room watching CNN updates on the world's latest real-life nightmare. Yes, people are robbed and cars are hijacked almost every day in Johannesburg, and factional violence is escalating as the first post-Mandela elections approach, and even laid-back Cape Town has had its problems in the past year with petty crime and budding gangster-terrorists. Just like in . . . you know.

But if you see such realities keeping you away, as opposed to keeping you on your toes, then maybe you're not going to get what you should out of a visit to South Africa, anyway. Its Euro-African wine-country Western Cape and its 16.3 million acres of protected game reserves notwithstanding, South Africa is where you go to see the worst, and best, that humans can do to, or with, each other. The fact that this drama plays amid a landscape of such astonishing beauty and scale is not some cruel cosmic prank, but a hidden boon that helps explain the lengths to which people have gone, over the centuries, to call this land their own.

Charmaine, my wife, once called this country her own--going to great lengths to love it, and probably greater ones to leave it. Our too-brief, 10-day spring visit was her first time back in two eventful decades to the land of her birth--to the rugged, still largely wild and sun-sharpened home she'd not seen since she left in 1977, a refugee from realities both political and personal. She'd actually seen it many times over the last 21 years, in dreams, wishes and assorted misgivings, and had told me so much about it over the years that I felt, though I'd never been anywhere in Africa before, that it might seem familiar.

How naive of me.

It was probably an overreaction, but I was stopped in my tracks, literally, by our first roadside encounter with a troop of baboons, for instance. About an hour south of Cape Town, we were driving through the 20,000-acre Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve on the way to the quaint Victorian restaurants and shops of Simonstown, the road following the narrow twisting ledge between towering ancient sandstone and the blue-black waters of False Bay and the mist-shrouded Indian Ocean beyond. I was thinking we could very well be driving through Big Sur--when we came around a curve and a troop of baboons, 30 or more of them, were crossing the road. How not Californian.

"Whoa," I said, braking, glancing at Charmaine. "What do I do? Do I stop, or speed up, or what?"

Charmaine looked at me briefly, and laughed. "It's okay, it's just baboons. You can stop."

I gaped as one of the larger dusky-gray guys climbed leisurely onto the roof of a stopped car 20 yards ahead and sat down, reaching down every few seconds to tap gently on the driver's window, obviously requesting a snack. (There are signs all over the reserve outlining the many ways yielding to such requests will lead to the baboons' demise.) Most of the rest of the troop was moving, led by a large male who had crossed the road and then sat, a few feet from our car, to watch his charges trudge calmly past him and disappear down a brushy path toward the sea. Babies clung to the necks and chest fur of a half-dozen of them.

"Pictures!" Charmaine said, and, seeing my face still frozen in dumb wonder, reached back for the camera and cranked her window down.

As she was snapping pictures, I was watching the group move by purposefully and with such quiet dignity, and thinking that I'd only seen a baboon before in the primate house of a zoo--an uncomfortable place where I remember mostly just trying to avoid the anguished stares of the inmates in their glass boxes. Here beside our car, when his troop had almost passed by, the seated male turned slowly to check out the inmates of this shiny metal box on wheels.

It was not an unfriendly glare--and maybe he was just checking to see if we might be dangling a sandwich from the window--but no animal I ever locked eyes with from behind the wheel made me wonder, as he did, which of us was trespassing.

We didn't pause anywhere long enough to be ticketed, in any case.

Our trip coincidentally preceded by a week President Clinton's whirlwind tour of the continent last spring (South Africa's autumn), including the couple of days he spent with Mandela and company. He, like us, covered much ground in an impossibly short time, greeted a few old acquaintances and made many new ones. He also took a few hundred aides and friends along in a half dozen Boeings, whereas the two of us rented a VW in Cape Town and--just over a week, two spare tires and one rear bumper later--turned it in at the airport in Johannesburg. We drove it from the Western Cape, along the nearly 500-mile Garden Route to Port Elizabeth, up the east coast to Durban, across the Drakensberg Mountains into the Free State and then on to Jo'burg, where we would meet our guide for a two-day stay at a game reserve north of the city. Charmaine wanted me to see everything--including her only sibling, Mel, and Mel's husband, Colin, neither of whom Charmaine had laid eyes on in 20 years. More important, though, she wanted me to feel everything.

No problem there.

At the start of the trip, Charmaine, once a principal dancer with one of South Africa's state ballet companies and now a dance teacher and movement therapist, had a three-day workshop to lead for a group of natural-health practitioners gathered at a Waldorf School (Waldorf Schools are big here) on the outskirts of Cape Town. The organizers had helped us find an extraordinarily reasonable self-catered apartment at a family-run place called Far Horizon, in the extraordinarily lovely village of Llandudno, overlooking the frigid but fetching Atlantic about a half-hour south of the city. While she taught, I toured the "Mother City"; in the evenings we returned to our little flat amid the steep streets of Llandudno, which bottoms out at a wide, private beach framed by immense boulders and lots of vaguely Spanish pastel-and-glass homes of similarly unimaginable proportions.

If Texans lived in South Africa, actually, they could finally tell the truth about the size of things. The seaweed that washed up daily on the beach at Llandudno, for instance: twisted, writhing clumps of slimy, 12-foot-long, brownish-green tubers. I said they looked like dinosaur intestines. Charmaine again chuckled at my reaction. Meanwhile, the next day, a scuba diver drowned after apparently getting caught up in the dinosaur intestines off Camp Bay. I rested my case.

I rested further by taking a few walks around the Llandudno boulders with Charmaine through the gentle, ankle-freezing surf that stopped us long before we reached the nude beach just around the bend; by stopping for some alfresco Italian at Camp Bay's smart Tuscany Beach restaurant; and sipping a few lattes and strolling the more than 200 upscale shops and restaurants of Cape Town's tourist showpiece, the multimillion-dollar Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. At the V&A, commercial fishing and shipping docks and warehouses have been expertly transformed into a lively, semi-multiracial neutral zone that includes a mall, an African craft bazaar, cafes, jazz clubs, restaurants (including a Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe), an excellent aquarium and free outdoor concerts--in all, a larger version of Baltimore's Harborplace or New York's South Street Seaport, but with ostrich and crocodile entrees and, like so many other places in South Africa where people feel safe and bring their wallets, a very high security fence around the perimeter (despite which a bomb, still unclaimed and universally decried, killed two and injured 27 at Planet Hollywood last August).

Cape Town, often described as the most European of African cities, sprawls and snuggles into the folds of 3,500-foot, 450-million-year-old Table Mountain, named for its flat top--from which, after a de rigueur cable-car ride a few minutes from downtown (or a hike through the surrounding 10,000-acre preserve), someone like me can clearly see that he is not in Beltsville anymore.

To the south the ridge continues to Cape Point, where it is topped with an old lighthouse and gift shop, and then plunges spectacularly down to the exact point where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet. Some say when the light is just so, you can see the line. We couldn't on the bright, warm day we hiked up to the old lighthouse (skipping the new funicular train), but we did marvel, our heads tilted back, at the steady stream of condensation flowing up the ridge from the sea below, which seemed to be turning into a string of clouds that moved off to the northwest. So this was where those things were made.

Back up on Table Mountain and looking north, you see the mid-rise city center itself, marked by the massive stone Castle of Good Hope, built in 1666 not far from the site of the original mud fort erected by Dutch East India Trading Co. pioneers a couple of decades earlier. Not far away is the excellent South African Museum, where eerily lifelike dioramas--its figures were cast from the faces of descendants in the early 1900s--depict the daily life of the Khoikhoi, or bushmen, the original Cape natives. (The Dutch settlers first traded livestock with the Khoi--and then slowly decimated them, with superior firepower and unwittingly imported disease, as they trekked north and east in the centuries that followed.)

Five miles farther north, beyond the harbor, you can also see the featureless limestone disk of Robben Island--site of the former prison that was Mandela's forced home for 18 years. Tour boats with closed-circuit TVs and air conditioning carry thousands of tourists daily from the gay V&A Waterfront to gray Robben Island for tours of the dusty low-slung facility--tours conducted exclusively by volunteer former prisoners, most of them African National Congress activists who pursued the anti-apartheid resistance in the years Mandela sat, studied and slept in the nondescript, painted-concrete confines of Cell No. 5. (The guide on my tour, John, a military officer whose five years as an inmate ended in 1991, a year after Mandela's release, lapsed during the tour into frequent, sudden silences. "For some," he explains later, driving a small group of us who didn't fit on the bus to the quarry where Robben Island inmates once mined limestone with pickaxes, "it's very difficult to be in the prison. There are some things you just want to forget.")

Most of South Africa's post-apartheid inequalities and indignities are economic, of course. Freed from imprisonment in remote, resource-free "homelands," many blacks and coloreds (a no-longer-legal but still widely accepted distinction between those descended from such indigenous tribes as Zulu or Xhosa, and those of mixed lineage) have migrated to where the money, and the family, is: the cities. Displaced and disgruntled masses from neighboring countries continue to take advantage of South Africa's relaxed immigration policies. Vast shanty towns now mark the outskirts of cities--many of which have also become the permanent homes of huge open-air markets, jury-rigged in squares and under freeway ramps.

One free afternoon, I arranged a tour of Cape Town's outlying shanty city, collectively known as Cape Flats but internally organized into sharply delineated "neighborhoods," according to guide Andre Mlungis Mackrill. I'd met Mackrill at Robben Island the day before, and picked him up in the V&A parking lot, and within a half-hour we were rolling slowly down the dusty streets of Nyanga, Guguletu and the Crossroads.

Khayalitsha is the Cape Flats' newest, largest and most overwhelmingly dispiriting shanty town--shacks are made of packing materials or trashbag-covered cardboard, there is no running water, and the government has managed to install only towering highway-style lights at irregular intervals through the settlement. In the middle of it, we pull over on a raised roadbed that crosses a foul creek near the center of the settlement, open the doors and stand on the floorboards for a look around. The settlement stretches as far as you can see in every direction.

"There is progress, aside from the government improvements and the housing and jobs provided by American and European corporations," Mackrill says. Those that are employed commute from here to the city by train or bus, he says, and if they are careful, and lucky, someday they will move on to a somewhat better place. "There are conflicting figures even of the size of the Flats," Mackrill says. "The government estimates the population here as about 500,000, but others say it's closer to a million--and there are 10,000 to 15,000 more who come in every month."

To keep to our tight schedule, we must get to Durban from Cape Town in three days. We make the mistake of taking the famous Garden Route through the indigenous yellowwood forests, sandstone cliffs, nature preserves and sleepy small towns along the southern coastline. It's a mistake, of course, because every sign beckons us to slow down and explore.

We do stop for an afternoon hike down through a tunnel of yellowwood to the swinging steel-cable pedestrian bridge over the Stormsriver in Tsitsikamma National Park, which falls within the smallest but most prolific of the world's six wild floral kingdoms and offers access to the coastline's world-renowned Otter Trail.

Between here and Grahamstown, the road--the N2--is fast and well-maintained, and can provide the attentive newcomer with a few clues to the simultaneously tough and gracious South African character. The N2 is largely a two-lane road, one in each direction, with a wide shoulder beside each. The routine goes this way: If the driver ahead sees a car gaining from behind, he pulls onto the shoulder. The faster car passes and flicks on the emergency flashers for a beat, in thanks. The slower car--often a truck--usually flashes back a you're welcome.

North of Grahamstown, as the N2 winds through the crevassed, overgrazed hills and less reliably maintained livestock fences of traditional rural Xhosa territory (which includes Mandela's childhood home in Qunu), it loses its shoulder--and can often gain an unexpected, jaywalking cow herd or goat around the next bend. Livestock being currency among the Xhosa, and the you-break-it-you-buy-it rule in effect, you should probably pass with care.

Time, of course, heals all wounds. I should add only that in the case of Charmaine and her sister, who hardly spoke in 20 years, the span of 8,000 mostly nautical miles and a hemisphere or two didn't hurt, either. The reunion in Durban, in any case, was a happy, long-overdue moment. So were the following two days, during which Mel and her husband, Colin, took us to see the bikini-clad surfer dudes and fully-beaded and -feathered Zulu rickshaw drivers along the beachfront in tropical, Miami-like Durban, South Africa's third-largest and fastest-growing city, as well as suburban Westville (where they live in a high-fenced but otherwise normal-looking condominium compound, and where we were rear-ended by one of the ubiquitous gypsy cabbies when the brakes failed to stop his minivan full of roughly 112 passengers, and where the shopping mall parking guards all lean over the windshield as you leave--to make sure there are keys in the ignition). And then, most memorably, they meandered with us for a day amid the waterfalls, craft emporiums, pastoral hills and grand Victorian country hotels of the KwaZulu-Natal province's Midlands, along the road to Pietermaritzburg.

One day, Charmaine's long-lost childhood buddy, Sandra, after hosting an early 50th birthday party for my wife at her elegant home overlooking a lush green valley just outside Durban, invited Mel and the friend she'd not seen for 30-odd years to spend the afternoon catching up. Colin took this opportunity, at a well-kept field not far from Durban's three professional rugby and soccer stadiums, to let me see him play the first club rugby match of the season, against a tough, integrated Durban Metropolitan Police team.

Afterward (the other team won), his teammates awarded the "man of the match" honors to Colin--who is 54, the club's eldest, and a guy who not long ago fought off a couple of knife-wielding would-be car hijackers, mostly with well-timed (and -aimed) kicks. The rugby prize was a second can of beer pitched at him, much like the first ones we all had to catch, at close to professional-softball speed.

The four of us met up for dinner at the team's Westville pub afterward. The place was empty when we arrived; by the time we finished eating, the bar area was filled with burly men with sore shins, most of them singing.

The rugby club's vocal stylings were sincere, but nowhere near as unexpectedly moving as a performance of the troupe of men and women at PheZulu, a re-created Zulu village overlooking the mist-shrouded green of the Valley of a Thousand Hills, west of Durban. Attached to a small gift shop and a modest crocodile zoo, PheZulu seemed, at first, kind of sad and touristy. Though they remain a distinctly proud and individually formidable people, few Zulus still live in the round, wattle-and-daub huts, or rondevals, in which PheZulu's traditionally costumed "villagers" demonstrate, for busloads of mostly pale-skinned outlanders, the everyday domestic and mystical routines of the Zulus. There was no way to know at that point that these were not mere interpretive guides but magicians as well.

After a few of them talked us through the rondeval, they sat the group of about 10 of us on benches facing a terrace whose sole backdrop was the valley itself. Others in regalia suddenly appeared, and after a slow start--someone's cell phone rang during a quiet moment--the group moved on to drumming and fiery, high-kicking dance to illustrate a courtship and marriage ritual.

The dancing transformed them. And when they finally stopped and stood, arms held straight at their sides, and raised their voices in that seemingly effortless, sublimely layered style made famous by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, they transformed us. I still cannot explain the lump in my throat (and in Charmaine's, too); I just want it to happen again.

To get from Durban to the last leg of our journey--a night and two days in a luxury tent camp amid the rhinos, leopards, giraffes and antelope at a game lodge two hours north of Johannesburg--you have to cross the formidable, hikable and entirely dramatic Drakensberg mountains. The crossing puts you briefly in the Free State, formerly the Orange Free State, the Afrikaner-dominated province where my wife was born of a British-Irish father and a mother who was mostly Dutch (which is the British way of saying Afrikaner). We originally planned to swing through it on the way into Lesotho, the small, landlocked mountain kingdom where Charmaine opened her first dance school--but we had run out of time. We would have to settle for a quick drive through the Free State on the way north.

"Settle" was probably not the correct choice of words. It's a steep and twisting route over the 10,000-foot pass, first of all, and this afternoon's road construction intermittently closed one of the two westbound lanes--already crowded with gear-grinding semis and dangerously full dump trucks. Then, as we neared the crest, a huge African thunderstorm descended--buckets of rain, hail, lightning strikes close enough for simultaneous thunder, visibility zero, trucks and flashing lane markers everywhere. At the crest, the sun broke through--just above the horizon and dead ahead--but it continued to pour. I'd never before had to use wipers and visor at the same time.

The rain stopped as abruptly as it started, of course. The clouds billowed and scattered and began to blush as the reddening sun sank into the foothills. Orange light caught the tops of roadside fynbos and fields of wild cosmos as we resumed our 150-kph cruise through rolling hills and vast open fields. The sun took close to an hour to stop playing with the sky and go to sleep. We still call it our "biblical" passage into the Free State.

We spent our last two days in the South Africa that visitors probably remember most vividly--and about which Charmaine spoke most often and longingly: the bush. Here, in the shadows of a thick low-slung forest and the shimmering distance of the vlei, or low grasslands, we spotted ostrich, aardvark, hartebeest and wildebeest, warthogs and a crocodile, branch-leaping bush babies (tiny big-eyed primates that look like a cross between an owl and a kangaroo), and a shy but vocal hippo. And, the highlight of the trip for me, we had a brief but close encounter with a large male giraffe. Like the baboons, I'd seen giraffes at the zoo, but it hardly registers next to the experience of meeting one in the wild--where he's seen you coming, and stops eating to stare briefly with those impossibly large dark eyes, and then begins a graceful, almost surreal lumbering retreat toward the next stand of umbrella trees . . . and is gone.

I felt lame. And I felt briefly terrified--when we left the Land Rover, in particular, to follow on foot the trail of the notoriously unpredictable white rhino. And, in the end, I felt more sharply and deeply alert than I ever remember feeling in staff meetings or on the Red Line.

There were no lions or elephants at the game reserve north of Johannesburg (and since sold to a group of hunters), but we weren't looking for adventure. Safari guide Les Brett, a stocky, sharp-witted ex-army officer, seemed more at ease amid these prehistoric blackthorn trees and industrial-strength, trail-spanning golden-orb spider webs than he was amid the modular lounge furniture of the suburban Midrand hotel where we met the night before. That's what we were looking for. That, plus the high-powered rifle.

In the late afternoon, we celebrated Charmaine's 50th birthday with a well-earned nap in the absolute stillness of our luxury tent camp. I don't remember falling asleep.

South African Airways has nightly nonstops from Miami to Cape Town and was most recently quoting a $1,352 round-trip fare, with restrictions. For about the same price, Virgin Atlantic said it could get you to Johannesburg from New York, with a stop in London. There are no direct flights to South Africa from any of Washington's airports.

Contact the South African Tourism Board in New York at 1-800-822-5368. For Western Cape information on the Web, try www.wcapetourism.co.za or www.nelsonsguides.co.za; and for Durban and KwaZulu-Natal details, www.durban.org is very helpful. Guide Les Brett is based in Lonehill (011-27-802-3029), and offers tailored eco- and adventure-tour packages in Zululand, the Timbavati area of Kruger National Park and elsewhere. Outside Cape Town in Llandudno, Far Horizons self-catered apartments can be reached at 011-27-21-790-1734 or http://users .iafrica.com/j/jo/johnsonr.