We arrived in Cape Town 3 days ago; we flew in from Newark via Amsterdam which gave us a total flight time of 21 hours ... plus a 3-hour layover in Amsterdam. And those 12 hours that you spend flying over the entire continent of Africa from north to south seem to drag on forever. Every time you check the flight status map the plane looks like it's still in the same place as it was the last time you checked. It was all worthwhile though because our hotel in Cape Town was very nice and we were greeted there with a nice chilled bottle of champagne in our room to help us shake our jet lag.
Our tours of Cape Town were quite thorough. On Thursday morning, bright and early at 9am (no sleeping in on this honeymoon!), our private tour guide Colin picked us up at our hotel in a mercedes. He drove us down the western coast of the Cape and we stopped at a few beaches along the way and a little market where we had some coffee and bought a wall hanging to give to Jeff and a hippo carved out of some sort of stone. Cathy asked the woman selling it what it was made out of and she said "stone." Right but what type? "Stone." Okey doke.
Then we went to the Botanical Gardens, which were by far the best Botanical Gardens we’ve ever been to. They covered something like 500 acres of land – you could spend an entire week exploring it. There were many classes of schoolchildren there; it seemed like a great place to take a field trip to. There were some large spiders there though.
Our guide Colin:
For lunch we went to a restaurant with huge windows all along one of its walls overlooking the water in the bay below. There was a seal or sealion playing around in the kelp the entire time we ate lunch. We each got a 3-course lunch, which included a generous dessert, and we managed not to be hungry for the rest of the day.
We spent the afternoon traveling down the western coast of the Bay (don’t remember the name of it but I think it was False Bay because explorers thought it was the other side of Africa but it was just a bay on the way). We saw African penguins and a baboon sitting on the hood of some tourist’s car and a few ostrich grazing by the ocean. We took some pics by the sign for the southwesternmost point of the African continent and then climbed up to the Cape of Good Hope lighthouse. It was pretty chilly and windy by the shore. Nice to be in winter weather for a bit though, as we had left hot and humid weather back home.
I was sick by now with a cold so we ordered some room service for dinner. We weren’t really all that hungry after our huge lunch anyway.
The second day in Cape Town we headed out to Stellenbosch to start the morning off right with a wine tasting at the Waterford winery. Here we tasted several white wines and then a few reds, and then we got to try 3 red wines paired with different chocolates. One of the chocolates had rock salt in it, which was interesting. However, it was a new experience to sip wine, bite chocolate, and then sip wine again and note how the flavors changed with different types of chocolate. This winery also does some sort of fun bike tour where you bike up to the winery (quite hilly) and then you sit and drink (complementary champagne, winery tour, and then your tasting), and then you bike back to wherever you started from. Can't imagine that drunken bike ride home!
After our first tasting we went to the Cheetah preserve to pet some cheetahs. You can only pet them at 10am because that's right after they get fed so they're fat and lazy and unlikely to eat you. An employee still has to supervise your cheetah petting, while he holds the cheetah on a leash so it can't suddenly decide to eat you. We got to pet a male cheetah named Enigma ($15 each to pet an adult, more to pet a cub) who purred and purred and purred. Cheetahs purr very loudly, and their fur is very coarse and close to their bodies. They are not fluffy or soft animals at all. Cheetahs are on the brink of extinction and this preserve was not breeding cheetahs to attempt to repopulate the species, but was instead breeding dogs. Apparently many cheetahs are killed by farmers who are trying to save their herds of sheep from an attacking cheetah. However if instead a farmer gets a special dog that thinks it's a sheep or a goat (because it was born and raised with sheep or goats) then it will protect the herd by scaring off attacking cheetahs without killing them. Neat.
And then, of course, lunch!!! We ate at a french restaurant, La Petite Ferme (http://www.lapetiteferme.co.za/), overlooking the Franschhoek valley. The food was amazing - another 3-course lunch including enormous desserts and copious amounts of wine. It's hard to believe we stayed awake afterwards. But, we rolled back into our mercedes and we were driven to more wine tasting! This time at the Anura winery, which is on the border between Paarl and Franschhoek I believe. Anura's mascot is an enormous frog. Fun. Here we got to taste wine paired with different cheeses and jams, all home made right there on the farm where they grew their grapes. And, as with many wine tastings, they just kept bringing us more and more wines even though we were only supposed to taste 5.
We decided we couldn't order room service on both of our nights in Cape Town so we manned up and ... ate dinner in the restaurant in our hotel. I was still quite sick and it was pretty cold outside and we were both exhausted after all of our eating and wine tasting. Martin had an amazing dish with a cream sauce, bacon, and kudu in it. Kudu is an amazingly delicious meat, and also a beautiful animal should you ever see one - especially the males with their big twisty horns:
Saturday morning we got up at 4am and were driven to the Cape Town airport to catch our 6am flight to Jo'burg, then on to Maun, then on to our first safari camp. We were met by an airport guide with bottled waters at every stop. Ker and Downey tours must be designed for retarded Americans who get lost and confused easily in foreign airports. We managed to use our guide in the Jo'burg airport to locate a pharmacy so we could buy more Sudafed. We also found and bought bug repellent that is 80% Deet. Can’t find that in the USA. The Jo'burg airport, by the way, is an enormous and beautiful airport, newly redone for the World Cup in 2010. There were actually several pharmacies and like an entire mall in that airport.
One thing that really struck us that we did not manage to get any pictures of were all of the shanty towns in the Cape Town area. This is where all of the black people live who are searching for employment in South Africa. Here, they are guaranteed shelter, water, and electricity, albeit in the form of sheets of tin on top of glorified cardboard boxes, all leaning into each other in rows. SA is apparently going to replace these towns with better housing, but it seems like they need to find more space in order to upgrade the housing of so many people.
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