Not all of the education in Cape Town is planned. Much of it comes in the form of unexpected and even serendipitous encounters like these selected from the reporter's notebook:

On a tour of Cape Point National Park.
George Kleyn's knowledge of the Cape Peninsula is encyclopedic. A retired high school teacher, he turns a tour of the area into a lesson in botany, geology, history, civics. The Cape Point National Park, he says, is home to hundreds of different species of heather. The mountains in the region are "a botanist's paradise." Yet for all of its vastness and diversity, numbers are also at the root of South Africa's problems, he says. Millions of people have come from the north and east to the Cape Town region, but there are few natural resources or industries to support them. Unlike the United States during its westward expansion, South Africa is hemmed in by oceans and poverty. "Where are people going to go?" he says, pausing from his recital of the Cape's attributes. "This is the Third World. It's not just us."

Open-mike night in a small jazz club called Swingers, in Lansdowne Township in the Cape Flats.
The musicians include local luminaries and teenage admirers. Guitarists Errol Dyers and his brother, Alvin, perform to raucous applause and, after their set, the American visitor is invited over to the bar to meet them. Then the club owner, Joe Schaffers, says something unexpected, exposing an unanticipated rift in the Cape Town music world. "These musicians who say they were exiles from South Africa [before apartheid fell]," he says, leaning close and jabbing his finger at the air. "They were not exiled. They ran away." Schaffers then points to Errol Dyers and his bandmates. "I love these guys," he says. "These are the guys who stayed."

On the four-lane N2 highway between downtown Cape Town and Cape Town International Airport.
The expressway slices through the townships and a squatter settlement near Bonteheuwel where residents use carts pulled by ponies. It's a straight shot, and the Mercedeses and BMWs streak past vans and slower cars. On one taxi trip, a high-performance BMW flashes past the squatter shacks. "What do the poor think when they see someone in a car like that when they make so little money?" the driver, a man named Winston Adonis, is asked.

Winston, who is colored, says the Mercedeses and BMWs show what is possible in the new South Africa. "I believe there is no situation so difficult that you can't get out of it," he says. "It's the wanting."

Inside "South Africa's Smallest Hotel."
Vicky's Bed and Breakfast is in Khayalitsha, a sprawling township that is home to 1.3-million people. It's a poor place, dirt lanes and cinderblock houses, but there is a new industry here: tourism. Europeans and other foreigners ride through in vans and buses as guides recite the bleak history of apartheid South Africa. Then the vans stop, and camera-toting tourists, most of them white, troop into shebeens, spazas [stores]--and Vicky Ntozini's little bed and breakfast.

She is an energetic, avowed entrepreneur who endured patronization and ridicule as she got her business off the ground. Now the comfortable little house with two small rooms is doing a booming trade. "We had CNN in here. We had the BBC. You name it," Ntozini says. "Thanks to a tourist from America, we have a Web site (journey.digitalspace.net/vicky.html)."

On Robben Island.
Macy Lubalo and Nhi Nhi Malgas say they work at the NY1/Clinic in Guguletu, a township. They do HIV testing, they say, the results running four out of five positive. "Every weekend we bury people who die of AIDS," Malgas says matter-of-factly. Lubalo nods in agreement. "Every week," she says, "one that you know."

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