Tom: Cape Town

It feels like I spent my formative years flying to places. My parents split early and I travelled back and forth between hemispheres for over a decade; they were very good about sharing time, despite the great distance. I was pretty travel-savvy by my late teens and enjoyed planes and airports with a familiarity probably unusual in someone my age. I enjoyed another ten years of solo adventuring and bouncing between continents before finally settling down in Cape Town. This image says that there is, literally, no place like home for me. Toronto is where I grew up and will always be familiar and safe-feeling; my big North American city that’ll never grow so big that it alienates me. But Cape Town is where my people are – the friends I came of age with – it’s the place that adventure brought me to, and I’ll never take that lightly. Living in South Africa feels a little like living in the Wild West, where the rules are fluid and you do what you have to do to get things done. That freedom is invigorating.