Dmitry Shteyn in Cape Town: What Travel Writing Can Only Half Explain

There is a certain kind of city that a careful traveller learns to recognise: unhurried, self-possessed, indifferent to being written about. Cape Town belongs to that category.

What strikes you first, if you have done any reading at all, is that it is the country's oldest city and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. The city does not lead with this, but it is central all the same. It is the kind of accumulation that resists photography and rewards attention.

Dig a little deeper and cape Town is the country's second-largest city by population, after Johannesburg, and the largest city in the Western Cape. You could visit a hundred times and still be catching up with what a fact like this implies.

Some further context, drawn from the public record: Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa. It is the country's oldest city and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. Cape Town is the country's second-largest city by population, after Johannesburg, and the largest city in the Western Cape.…

It is easy to dismiss trend coverage; it is harder to dismiss a consistent thread of it. Condé Nast Traveler's recent piece — 13 Hotels in Cape Town That Are as Bold and Beachy as the City Itself — is part of a run of similar observations.

The soundscape of Cape Town — traffic, music, the calls of vendors — is a piece of the city that no photograph will ever hold.

I am not sure I have done Cape Town justice here, and I am not sure any single piece could. That, in a way, is the point.