Ellis Park pool, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph by MARCO LONGARI / AFP / Getty

I have a friend who needs to go running in a new city before he understands it. Long, punishing runs, involving early mornings and carefully plotted routes, are his way of acclimating himself. Another friend needs to drive. A place makes no sense to her until she has looked at it from behind the wheel of a car, mapped out its roads and hooted contemptuously at a local for ignoring a traffic sign. There are all sorts of other ways to befriend a city, to feel less lonely in it. Some will argue, probably with cause, that no one is better at this than a skateboarder. Walking is fine, too. I know people who have got good results from a sustained assault on a city’s dive bars. I see the value of these approaches, but only up to a point: running is not fun, driving somewhere unfamiliar is scary, I obviously can’t skateboard, walking is boring, and it is impractical to always be drunk. I have my own, superior method of getting to grips with a place. I go swimming in its pools.

I remember every swim I’ve had in a new city, good or bad, and it has always colored all subsequent impressions. London, for me, is brought into focus by the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, in Hampstead Heath: the too-cold water, the ducks, the sensible bathing attire, the surprising number of old ladies with their tops off. Sydney is the Bondi Icebergs Club, and the view of the Tasman Sea, and all the terrifyingly vital people. I can’t think of Los Angeles without thinking of the L.A. Athletic Club, and the chlorine in my eyes, and the man who I decided was famous, impatiently eating cornflakes at a poolside table. (His technique was to open his mouth very wide and sort of throw the cereal inside it.) And my method works for familiar places, too. I grew up in one South African coastal city, Durban, and moved to another one, Cape Town, and when I describe either place I begin with the pools. Cape Town is Sea Point: picturesque, popular, and colder than it looks. Durban is Tesoriere: palm trees, vervet monkeys draping themselves along the far fence, warmer than is ideal, and sometimes they just let you in without paying.

I’ve unlocked many places this way, but until recently one had always remained closed to me: Johannesburg. It is a city with passionate detractors and defenders, the worst place in the world, or the best. When I told people I was going there for a tour of the public bathing facilities, I got one of two responses. Either they would launch immediately into a sales pitch for their favorite pool (“Ellis Park makes you feel like you’re in the Olympics!” “Bluest water at Orlando West!” “Faded glamour at Zoo Lake!” “Yeoville!” “Kensington!”), or they would wrinkle their noses and tell me that public pools are gross. There were also a few who mentioned Neddy Merrill. Talk of swimming pools often raises the Cheever alarm.

I started at the Orlando West Pool, in Soweto, on Reconciliation Day. This was perhaps an overtly symbolic choice, but swimming has always been too symbolic for its own good, especially in South Africa. The markedly spatial impact of apartheid policies means that we still live in divided cities. The mostly white suburbs have good roads, big gardens, freestanding houses, and private pools; the mostly black townships, like Soweto, generally do not. The public holiday now known as Reconciliation Day used to be called the Day of the Vow, and commemorated the Boer victory over the Zulu army at the Battle of Blood River. The Day of the Vow celebrated white-minority rule, black subjugation, and blood. Since 1994, it has been rebranded as a day on which all South Africans are supposed to concentrate hard on nation-building and the fostering of unity between us. I do not know whether the people at the Orlando West Pool that day bought into this idea, but I can confirm that they were having a good time. There were a lot of braais, a lot of pots of food being lifted over the entry turnstiles, a lot of umbrellas being opened and picnics laid out. Little kids in very bright swimming costumes ran around in groups, shrieking. Couples twisted their legs together in the water and gave each other some pretty abrasive splashes.

The pool was, as promised, very warm and very blue. The lifeguards were dreamy. I watched a woman and her twin daughters. She was trying to do laps, the woman, but she was occupied mostly with the task of preventing her kids from drowning each other. Not in a mean way—they’d just get too excited, and climb on each other too much, and then one would suddenly be underwater for too long, and the mum would have to shout. I did a fair bit of agitated yelping myself, hovering anxiously near them in the water. The mum saw me watching and rolled her eyes. “Don’t ever have children,” she said, in a tone devoid of humor. She might have said this in a queue at the supermarket, but would we have gone on to have a twenty-minute conversation about the weirdness of twins? I doubt it. That we were both chest-deep in water and wearing swimming costumes lent the whole thing a particularly intimate air. I emerged from the pool feeling that we were best friends.

I got into startlingly personal interactions with strangers at almost every other pool I visited. Old ladies at Zoo Lake asked me where I got my swimming costume, and then proceeded to tell me about their dead sisters. Young women at Linden offered me the use of their sunscreen, and then told me about their paralyzing crush on their boss. I floated in the middle of Ellis Park pool while a shy teen-age boy spoke to me about how much he hated water polo, but his mum wanted him to do it, so here we were. This is something I have always observed about swimming with other people, especially if they are strangers: it jerks away social barriers in a manner comparable only to the effects of alcohol. Johannesburg, I decided, might not have much going on in the way of natural beauty, but its pools are excellent.

I’m back in Cape Town now, and I swim at the Long Street Baths, an indoor pool right in the center of the city. There is a woman I see there a lot, who is on a similar swimming schedule to mine, and whom I have come slowly to revere. She is so testy. Her meanness takes a particular shape, in that it comes to life only when she is in the pool. It’s the most extraordinary thing. The two of us put on our swimming costumes side by side in the changing room. Maybe we smile at each other, but we mostly avoid eye contact. Then we get into the pool area, and the magic happens. She gets that sting of chlorine in her nose, and she moves immediately upon my works, Ulysses S. Grant-style. She is merciless, a witch, a queen. She has shouted at me about having the wrong swimming cap, about my failure to shut the changing-room door properly, my inability to go down a ladder the right way, the amount of splashing that I do, the wet footprints that I leave. It might be that she goes through the world this way, but I like to imagine that the pool is the only place where she allows her true nature to reveal itself.