What Not to Miss in Coffee Bay

It’s a cliché to say that a country is one of stark contrasts. It’s just been said so many times about so many countries. But with South Africa, it’s really true.

One day I’m drinking sumptuous craft beers in a hipster ale house in a gentrified neighborhood of Cape Town; another day I’m squatted down in a hut in a village with no electricity, sipping a piercingly sour maize-based brew called umqombothi from a communal pot. Both are equally South Africa.

Leaving behind the wealthy Western Cape and heading further east to a region called the Wild Coast, it’s almost as though you cross an invisible border. Mediterranean scrub and modern buildings make way for wooded savanna and African villages with pastel-colored roundhouses. This is Xhosa country: less tamed and much more traditional.

It’s also much poorer. At one of our stops along the way, I help our bus driver hand out bread and fizzy drinks to kids from a village. Our arrival creates a little commotion…