The public buses on Italy's Amalfi Coast certainly aren't as glamorous as the region they service. The Amalfi Coast is a landscape of sheer cliffs and impossibly turquoise seas, but the buses have springs that pop out of the seats, windows that are grimy and cracked, suspension that groans, ventilation that smells like recycled chewing gum and lewd messages scrawled in Tipp-ex on most of the headrests.
I was sitting in the back row of one these buses as it lurched along the narrow coastal road, trying to contain my nausea, when I had an epiphany: my wife and I had flown half way across the world when we could have had the same experience in a Golden Arrow bus on Chapman's Peak Drive.
It wasn't the first time I had felt this way. Earlier that morning, as we rumbled through the outskirts of Naples in the same bus, I gazed up at the sagging tenements under a leaden sky and battled to shake the feeling that I had seen it all before - in the south of Durban, on the road past Kingsburgh, Queensburgh and Amanzimtoti.
And it happened in Athens too. A week previously, at the beginning of our European honeymoon, we had touched down in the Greek capital in a haze of cigarette smoke and fried garlic. The touristy parts of the city looked like the set of Spartacus, but the real, working-class areas of Athens were like a never-ending vision of Cape Town's Lansdowne Road. We were in another bus, equally as seedy, watching scooter dealerships, grimy cafés and shops selling second-hand power tools scroll past.
I felt jubilant. Europe wasn't the slideshow of postcards I'd been led to believe, but a living, breathing ensemble of micro lenders, men in leather jackets and moustaches, rickety taxis, decaying infrastructure and annoying graffiti. Just like home! South Africans love the idea of "overseas" and are always pointing out how much better other countries are. But, from what I had seen, we were an easy match for most of what Greece and Italy had to offer. Sure, I may be called a Philistine for comparing Tuscany to Centurion, but take the SR2 highway past Sienna and you'll see what I mean. Our local property developers certainly did their homework.
The real romance of being in Europe actually had nothing to do with the scenery - it was the food, the accents, the funny traffic rules and the lingering twilight, the day-to-day mathematical challenge of packing a suitcase with an ever-increasing quantity of clothes and gifts, and the thrill of being totally anonymous in a foreign land.
We spent the last week of our holiday in London with South African friends who hadn't managed to attend the wedding. I heard more Afrikaans than I hear in a week at home. We talked rugby, politics and careers - the same things we would have spoken about around the braai, except that we were in a pub called the Garden Gate and it was drizzling outside.
That evening, wedged between the Tube zombies during rush hour, I suddenly realised that I was homesick. I'd been homesick the whole time. In Piccadilly Circus, Jess and I embraced in the frigid dusk, clinging to each other for dear life.
"I can't wait to go home," she whispered to me.
I couldn't have agreed more.
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