When I traveled to South Africa in 2006, I flew into Cape Town and stayed there for a couple days before driving the east on the Garden Route with friends. It was a hurried, jet-lagged fog of a stop in Cape Town. Even in the fog, a few clear memories stand out.

For one, the landscape was breathtaking and I was enveloped by the lush green of Table Mountain & the foam of the sea. It seemed like everywhere we went in the city for those two days, we used Table Mountain as our true North. We were either driving away from it, around it, or to it. I can still feel the warm wind on my skin when I think of Table Mountain.

Second, I remember ordering a water at a burger joint and the waitress not understanding me. “WAH-ter,” I said with my midwestern accent (nasal on the “a” and heavy on the “r”).

“What’s that?” she replied, confused by my request.

“Oh, um… WAW-duh.” My foreign accents have always been embarrassing, but I gave it a go.

“Oh right, WAW-duh.”

My third clear recollection of Cape Town was a powerful one. I was standing with my companions, feet in the sand, breathing in the salt air. Windsurfers hopped playfully along the waves. It was so familiar, like we were playing around in southern California. Then a friend of mine pointed out over the water. “Do you see that? That’s Robben Island.”

My heart flipped. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years. I wasn’t in California. I let the moment wash over me and over me again. Growing up as a young American, descriptions of Apartheid had always seemed distant and strange. Hearing stories of that struggle on a continent I had never known was much more like reading a period novel than actual current events. I ignorantly had no real frame of reference. It wasn’t until I was there, squinting out at a tiny island that I started to soak in the magnitude of what Mandela had done for South Africa and the whole world.

Yesterday, when I heard the news of Nelson Mandela’s passing, I was transported to that beach again. I reflected on that mountain of a man and the South Africa I was able to experience in 2006 because of him. I certainly join millions when I say that my heart is saddened by his death and inspired again by his legacy.

As we remember Nelson Mandela, I’ll leave you with one of his quotes that seems just as relevant today as when he first wrote it in his book Long Walk to Freedom: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Here’s a picture from my trip to South Africa: