City Life: Cape Town, South Africa

Is there any city on Earth with as many different faces as Cape Town? It can be gritty, chic, gregarious, refined, wild, or, if you're very lucky, all of the above.

- David Whitley

On Tuesday morning, the skies are clear. From the top of Table Mountain, everything seems beautifully defined. The walking trails act as scars through the rock and low fynbos shrub. Paragliders flutter down from the neighbouring Lion’s Head summit. Little dassies — scuttling guinea pig-like critters that are apparently the closest living relatives to elephants — munch away, oblivious to their cooing onlookers.

On Wednesday a­fternoon, Pinotages and Sauvignon Blancs are being greedily sampled at Groot Constantia’s cellar door. The Dutch Renaissance manor house at South Africa’s oldest winery (it was founded in 1685) sits handsomely amid an idyll of vines, the splendour question-marked only by the signs warning about potential marauding baboons.

On Thursday night, the City Bowl teems with people spilling out onto the streets clutching wine glasses and beer bottles. The monthly First Thursdays event sees galleries and shops open late, wine being poured in every conceivable location, and a sprawling melee taking over Church and Bree Streets. The hard part is getting to a bar to join in.

On Friday morning, women smeared in face paint to stave o“ the worst of the heat are cooking sheep heads over a spitting, fierce fire. They’re in the middle of the shacks of the Langa township, where everything seems to be ‘illegal but tolerated’. Dubious electricity wires have been hooked up to the lamp posts, and house-proud old men show how they’ve fashioned lamps from defunct blenders, and skylights from old wooden panels.