Wine Country: Stellenbosch & Franshoek

‘Wine Country’ in South Africa is Stellenbosch (mainly) and Franshoek (smaller). They are a mere hour’s drive from Cape Town, so you can come for the day, but we wanted to be able to stay and enjoy ourselves. They are also the food mecca of South Africa, and surrounded by some pretty fantastic mountains. We spent two days eating, tasting wine, and enjoying the surroundings. It was sunny and low 70’s, we had a few bad wines, lots of good wine, and some really standout wines. We’re not much for knickknacks, so came home with quite a few bottles of wine instead. Most of the wineries served outside, had you sit at tables, and would bring the next pour to you (instead of standing at the bar) so we were able to take our time and enjoy the scenery, and also had some very interesting and informative people serving us.

Favorite wines - Ken Forrester

yummy lunch outdoors

the Picanto..

We stayed in an adorable cottage at a working farm called Bo La Motte, and enjoyed cooking breakfasts, drinking coffee, and watching sunsets there. South Africa was by no means one of our cheapest trips – it’s nothing like expensive Europe, but also a long shot from dirt cheap South America or SE Asia as well.  Stellenbosch & Franshoek were the perfect embodiment of this though – amazing gourmet food and service (we had one dinner that was similar in service and food to Canlis) for the price of your average dinner out here in Seattle.  We had spent much of the trip cooking food for ourselves and eating over a campfire so we felt entitled to ‘splurge’ a bit and ate nice meals every chance we got for three days.

view from the cottage

view the other way

one of the wineries also had a car museum...

And with that, we conclude our journey. We went back to Cape Town for another day, but you already read about that. We flew home via Johannesburg, Lagos (Nigeria), and Houston. I won’t tell the whole story, but seriously, do whatever you can to avoid a layover in Nigeria. It took us 3.5 hours to get from one hallway to the next and we spent a portion of that time with our passports out of our sight. And that’s normal.

Anyways….we thoroughly enjoyed our trip. The first two weeks involved more driving than was ideal, but it was also the only practical way to see all the things we wanted to see. We had a ton of unique, special experiences, and a good mix of adventure and relaxation. We stayed away from the big cities except Cape Town, but never felt unsafe except perhaps in Lesotho. It was ‘winter’ but in the end I think it was a really good choice for time of year to go. It wasn’t the ‘easiest’ trip ever as far as language/cultural differences, but certainly not anywhere near the most difficult either. Seeing the big 5, hiking the coast & surfing, scuba diving, and climbing Lions Head are some of the things that will stick out most clearly in our memories.  As always, we loved our travel buddies Ashley & Steven (and you can read Ashley's food focused version of the events here).

Cape Town: South Africa

The next morning we were off to the East London airport again for our flight to Cape Town, the final leg of our South African journey. We had been planning to go straight down to Cape of Good Hope, but the discovery of the Kia Picanto somehow being significantly smaller than the Micra forced us to first go to our ‘villa’ where we were staying in Camps Bay. Table Mountain was covered in clouds despite the rest of the city being sunny. After offloading, we made the ~90 minute journey down to Cape of Good Hope/Cape Point, with cute little towns like Fishhoek and Simon’s Town along the way. We made a stop at Boulders Beach, which is famous for its penguin colony.  It was great to see our furry little friends again!

View from the plane coming in towards Cape Town

The Cape was beautiful, we were extremely lucky to get there to sunny clear skies and no wind, and spent a few hours wandering up to the lighthouse and then out onto Cape Point.

 Stevens

 Stevens

We were staying in Camps Bay, which is just a 10 minute drive from ‘City Bowl’ (downtown), but over a hill and had a much different ‘beach’ feel. We watched the sunset there and had some cocktails and then went to a great restaurant in the Seaview neighborhood, the first food we’d had on the trip that was really great. We learned from our proprietor that evening that the cable car to the top of Table Mountain was closed for ‘renovations’ for a two week period. We were sorely disappointed, and we didn’t have a whole day to devote to hiking up there (though we would have liked to)

We were headed to wine country the next morning and had planned to meet for breakfast at 8:30. At 5am I woke wide awake, and noticed Matt was at least half awake. I whispered ‘want to go on an adventure?’. I got a mumble and roll over, but 5 minutes later received a ‘what did you want to do’.  We got up, packed for the wine country (since it was still pitch black out) and then drove over to Lion’s Head. The guidebooks were in Ash & Steven’s room but I remembered reading that there was a cool hike to the top, so we drove aimlessly for a while until we finally spotted cars and humans, a good sign. The horizon was just beginning to brighten as we started, and the hike went from road to trail, to clambering up rock. The views were 360 degrees of Cape Town, the bay, table mountain, Cape Flats, Camps Bay, and out to the mountains. After enjoying 20 minutes at the top, we dashed headlong down, and arrived only 10 minutes late to breakfast. Table Mountain would have been great, but this was fantastic as you had view of the whole city and table mountain itself.

Camps Bay

City Bowl downtown

Table Mountain - cable car line

Seaview

Interlude – here we went to wine country, and then came back to Cape Town for another day, but I’m going to lump all of Cape Town together.

Our last day in the city we just walked and explored. Bo Kaap is the brightly colorful Muslim neighborhood. The Victoria & Alfred waterfront is full of nice shops and good restaurants, reminding me of Granville Island in Vancouver. Das Waterkant was another of the neighborhoods. Our proprietor suggested that in the evening we drive down to Haute Bay (10 miles south) where there was a market with ‘good food and arts, but not touristy’. We were a little suspicious, but made the drive and were glad we had. It was a converted commercial fishing building, at it truly was a place with just lots of local South Africans. Some of the crafts were kitschy, some pretty cool. The food stalls were awesome. We each took turns getting dishes from different places that we shared – Ethiopian, crepes, calamari, cheese board, pizza, and some really great pear cider. There was a band and lots of people enjoying themselves – a perfect relaxing place to spend our last night in the country.

Bo Kaap

V&A

souvineers