Our trip to southern Africa wound up with six days in the country of South Africa, where we visited Cape Town and then topped off the trip with a couple of relaxing days in nearby Stellenbosch wine country.
This was our first trip to Cape Town, so we did all of the touristy things that first-time visitors are virtually obligated to do: up Table Mountain, a trip to Robben Island, and exploring the V&A Waterfront. We also got out of town for a day and took a minibus tour down to the Cape of Good Hope then back through Boulders Beach to see the colony of cute Cape penguins. We had originally planned to rent a car and drive this area ourselves on the way to wine country, but after ~3,900 km of driving in Namibia we decided to give ourselves a break and let a pro do the driving. This decision turned out to be a great one since we got lively commentary and we both got to take pictures while enjoying the views, especially on Chapman’s Peak Drive.
We spent a couple of days based in Stellenbosch to cap our trip. It’s just a 45-minute Uber from Cape Town. The first day we spent just poking around the shops, seeing the university buildings, and enjoying the relatively cooler temperatures compared to the oven-like temperatures in most of Namibia. Although many businesses were closed for Good Friday (which we thought was odd in a tourist town) we enjoyed a great dinner at the Fat Butcher restaurant. The second day we treated ourselves to a long sleep-in and a late breakfast before embarking on a 3/4-day wine tour. It proved to be a huge advantage to be without our own car; we didn’t realize exactly how large the “tastings” would be and surely would have been in no shape to drive around on the wrong side of the road. Over the course of visits to three wineries with five tastings each, plus a stop for lunch with wine, we consumed well over a bottle each. We have no idea how the two guys with whom we shared the van managed on the full-day tour that started at 9:00 am. They were five half-glasses ahead of us before we joined the tour!
While we certainly enjoyed the relaxing time in Cape Town and environs, we weren’t as thrilled with Cape Town as the guidebooks predicted. One factor is that we live on the side of a mountain in greater Vancouver, one of the most beautiful coastal cities in the world, so Cape Town’s mountain and ocean combo wasn’t particularly special for us. And there’s no doubt that we were suffering from a bit of travel fatigue after the long days in Namibia, However, we think that the overriding factor may have been the still obvious effects of apartheid, even 30 years on. We stayed in the Bo-Kaap area in Cape Town, a former racially segregated area, rather than a big chain hotel downtown, so saw some of the underside of the city first-hand. (Amusingly, our guesthouse street was on the tour down to Cape Point that we took.) We also visited District Six Museum and Slave Lodge, so probably saw a bit more than most people get to. It’s certainly not all bad news. Despite the huge zinc shack shanty towns near Cape Town’s airport, there has been some progress in providing housing to replace these shacks. But we have visited few countries in the world where the gulf between rich and poor appears so wide.
This quote in a Slave Lodge museum exhibit kind of says it all (for us) about Cape Town:
And so, on our last morning in Stellenbosch we had breakfast, checked out, then jumped in an Uber to the airport to begin our 3-flight, 40-hour odyssey to return home.
See images on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720316137036
