I only spent three weeks in South Africa, but I left with a fascination about the country. That’s no surprise. After all, South Africa is a highly sought-after travel destination that attracts visitors from all over the world. Most people who visit South Africa probably leave with similar feelings — but for different reasons. I didn’t have this realization until my final moments in the country. While I was standing in the line to get my exit passport stamp, I was inevitably eavesdropping on the dozens of other tourists decked out in their finest safari fits. They shared animated stories about their experiences with the impressive array of wild animals in the country.

“I could hear the lions prowling outside my tent, but they never bothered us,” gushed one American who was heading to Washington DC. “As far as South Africa goes, our tents were like glamping,” he added.

Another woman from North Carolina boasted back to this man about the herds of zebra she witnessed in Botswana.

As I peered around at my fellow tourists at the airport, I realized that we had had completely different experiences in South Africa.

They all came for safaris and wildlife. I came to surf.

Perhaps I committed a cardinal sin by not doing safaris in South Africa, but I enjoyed the alternate route through the country that was led by the swells. By chasing waves instead of giraffes, I was shepherded to different nooks and crannies around the country’s 1,700 miles of coastline. I am not saying it was superior to the trips of the adventure outfit-toting tourists at the airport, it was just different — from the places I saw to the people I met, and debatably the impressions that I formed about the country.

We formed a surf crew of five friends: three Americans, a French man from Reunion Island, and Murray, who would be our South African surf guide. Over three weeks, we made our way across the country, stopping at the sugarcane farm of Murray’s family in Durban, bouncing over rutted roads in the remote Transkei region, sipping coffee alongside Kelly Slater in the surf town of Jeffrey’s Bay, and exploring the trendy neighborhoods under the shadow of Table Mountain in Cape Town.

We surfed nearly every day until exhaustion overcame us, overly pleased with the consistent swells produced by winter storms marching toward the Indian Ocean. And it was these routes, towns, and villages along the coastal corridor from which my initial understanding of the country began to take shape.

It’s no secret: South Africa has the greatest level of wealth inequality in the world. And, as you can imagine, it largely is a racial problem. It’s a problem that plagues much of the world, including my home of USA, but in South Africa it’s extreme. And it’s plain as day. Only about 8% of South Africans are white, but they own 72% of the individually owned land. Oftentimes it can feel like white South Africans make up a greater part of the population because these are the people we disproportionately came into contact with — travelers, business owners, surfers, etc.

When we left the wealthy suburbs of Durban and traveled south through dozens of little towns on our way to the Transkei coast, the reality of South Africa came more clearly into view. It’s as if there are two South Africas. The nearly all-black, impoverished towns spread across the barren hills along the route starkly contrasted with the more racially mixed, affluent neighborhoods of the big cities.

Another thing that struck me, and simultaneously impressed me, was the diversity of South Africans themselves. Where race and language often create borders between nations, I was fascinated by the different types of people that all call themselves South Africans.

The country has eleven different languages. We encountered the Zulu-speaking people of the east, the Xhosa people of the center, the Afrikaans speakers of Dutch descent, and the immigrants of the British Isles, whose language, English, has become the lingua franca, among others.

And it’s not just black and white in South Africa. When you see the plentiful curry houses of Durban you realize that there are 1.5 million Indians living in the country. And South Africa has a unique ethnic group of their own that they have officially coined as ‘Coloured‘ — a diverse group who are mainly mixed with British, Irish, German, Mauritian, Indian, Zulu, and Xhosa genes.

Life in South Africa can take some getting used to for travelers. The term that we became quite familiar with was ‘load shedding’ — a fancy phrase surely crafted by mastermind marketers for cutting the power. Years of corruption, mismanagement, and even internal sabotage have left the country unable to meet its energy demands. As a result, there are scheduled power outages one to three times per day in two to three-hour blocks. It makes working online a little tricky, as I had to plan my schedule around the availability of electricity.

Lack of electricity would cause riots in much of the developed world, but South Africans seem to have adapted and accepted the hiccup as another problem among many.

It was nice to travel with a local South African, as well. We were able to discuss our impressions, bounce ideas off each other, and have thoughtful answers to our cultural and historical questions that came up. South Africa is particularly complex and obviously cannot be fully grasped on a three-week road trip, but having Murray around definitely aided in the process. And on the other hand, Murray said he enjoyed experiencing his country through a fresh set of eyes.

I don’t know when, if ever, I will be back in South Africa. Perhaps I should return with my freshest safari gear and long lens to check out the animals. Or perhaps if I return, the wild, empty coastline will yearn for my attention once again.

I’ve been removed from the country for a few days now, and the South African greetings that I, at first, jokingly repeated, have now somehow found a way into my lexicon. Every time my brain signals for me to greet someone with “Howzit?” and thank someone with “Shot”, I get a little reminder of my time in South Africa. It’s an invisible souvenir of sorts, another mark of many left on my life from the countries that I’ve visited.