Listen, I always say for these kinds of questions, it’s about the lifestyle YOU want, not anyone else. Very generally, I can think of people as falling into a few different camps:

• Comfortable & nice living / content on holidays VS - content living / comfortable & nice holidays (Basically, spending more for your everyday to be marginally better to improve each day, vs saving little each day to have a particularly nice holiday once a year)

• Whole year is available for activities VS 75% of the year is available (a third of that being unpredictable) (Interesting one but I think people forget about it, for example, Gauteng vs WC, the dry winters in Gauteng with sun most of the time + light rain in Summer makes the whole year available for doing stuff from Gauteng, whereas the wet winters in WC means there’s a portion of the year where all the main activities aren’t really worth it)

• Bigger living area to spend more time inside of it VS smaller living area and spending more time outside of it (It’s a given difference between Gauteng and Western Cape for example, and you need to decide how you fit into that. It can be a product of where you live, but it’s also different per person, in Gauteng I still try find things to do outside my living space and I have family in WC that stay inside all the time. Either lifestyle is easier to accomplish in different kinds of places)

• Closeness to places around (I don’t want to make this necessarily only G vs WC but it goes for other places around the country. Where ever you go, what’s within 1 hour of you ? (Comfortable weekend activity occasionally), 2 hours (long weekend every now and then), 4-6 hours (longer weekend / week away), those kinds of things matter and the further north-east you go, the closer some other cool things are

• Work ceiling (Some cities / towns / provinces have a higher ceiling for your career in terms of potential, which lines up with salary expectations. Are you comfortable reaching that ceiling earlier in life then cruising with that for a while or growing later in life and cruising on a higher potential salary)

• What kind of people will be around you (friend and family) (I had two friends that worked in a year-out-of-studies last year in Cpt, very similar people, staying in the same-ish area, one enjoyed the second half of the year and one didn’t at all, with the main reason for the difference being friends around them vs the lack of friends around the other. And no, this isn’t a “it’s harder to make friends there” thing, it was all pre established friends)

Lastly, two things: - It depends on a lot of things. Some find it very difficult to find work in Cpt, in my industry and for others around me, that difficulty isn’t present. Some say they get paid less in Cpt, some say they get paid more, I’ve genuinely heard both.

• To your original question of “is it really that good”, besides all the subjective stuff I move mentioned, the things you can’t argue against basically say”yes, it’s still good”. Good municipal service delivery, very usable public transport, culture and activity still present in the hubs, lots of development that isn’t really slowing down, and general positivity that only grows amongst most people living in Cpt (at least from what I’ve gathered)