Fast Forward Recap

Okay, despite my best efforts to pull together a comprehensive day-by-day account of our remaining time in Cape Town, I simply seem to be taking far too long. So, here is the quick recap version. A VERY detailed account of our time spent in the African Bush will be soon to follow.

7/1/08
We headed back to the Chinese Consulate on July 1st, and thankfully after handing over a ridiculous amount of South African Rand, we walked away with two tourist visas to China. Oh Yeah!

After our successful visit to the consulate we went to grab a bite to eat, and head over to visit Table Mountain. Table Mountain is a flattened bluff like mountain (truly ancient compared to the Rockies), which dominates the skyline above Cape Town. You can hike up (about 2 hours all straight up) or take the rotating cable car…hmmm, cable car it is.

We spend a few hours hiking and exploring the top of Table Mountain, eating cheese and pears and admiring the vistas – stretching from the Horn of Africa back towards Camps Bay and back to the harbor. It is a beautiful place.

We finished up our day packing up as we head out of Cape Town tomorrow, and had a dinner of Gourmet hamburgers and Melon and PB & Banana Milkshakes. Tomorrow we are off to begin our tour of the Garden Route of the South African coast.


7/2/08
We rented a car online and are prepping to pick it up, when we realize that we haven’t gotten confirmation that the rental has gone through. Our handy dandy travel office friend Wayne helped us out by calling to check on the car, and to our dismay they downgraded the rental and are charging us more. Wayne saved the day by calling a local company and getting us a better car for less money – however it is still a manual transmission with the steering wheel and gear shift on the wrong side – what can you do?

We finally leave Cape Town, driving on the left side of the road, and with Ulises struggling to get the car position right – just a note, Americans tend to favor riding on the left shoulder. The driving was really amusing, every turn we kept repeating – “stay left, stay left, stay left” and with each new road we discovered that in South Africa, one-lane highways are actually two lane highways. The slower vehicles pull over to the left (past the yellow line on the shoulder) so faster vehicles can pass on the right. This is an ingenious and effective system until you have a bunch of people, cows or goats walking on the shoulder – I can only imagine the accident statistics in S. Africa.

Today’s objective is to make it to Stellenbosch, a small college town that is in the heart of wine country. All works out well and we check into our guest house, have a quick seafood dinner, and do some window shopping before drifting off to sleep in the near 0 degree Celsius weather.

7/3/08
Today we woke up early and set out for the Blauklippen winery, one of the oldest in Stellenbosch. We were the first group to arrive for a tasting, and we had quite a good time talking to the wine barista (not sure what you would call a wine pourer) about the fact that she has to taste every bottle that she opens of the 18 varieties of wine that are available for tasting, and on average she opens 30 bottles of each every day – that’s something like 540 sips of wine (she’s not swallowing it) every day!

We had a quick meal and headed out on the garden route, this is basically a very picturesque drive along the N-2 on the southern coast of S. Africa. It runs from the Wine Route to the outskirts of Jeffrey’s Bay and cuts through some drastically varied landscapes – from marshy wetlands, to forest, to large expansive ostrich farmlands, to jagged mountains and rocky bays.

We stopped in Mossel Bay to watch the ocean and surfers for a while, and then continued on the route past Knysna and Plettensburg to Kerboomstrand – where our lodging was. We checked into the guest house and sat around gawking at how a husband and wife could run a guest house on such a gorgeous point of land, with private beach with whales swimming off the coast is on one side, and rolling mountains populated with baboons and bushbuck are on the other side. We closed out the day by eating Italian food at Enricos beachside restaurant, and fell asleep listening to the sounds of the ocean.

7/4/08
HAPPY 4th OF JULY! We set out to explore today, and stumbled upon the 25th Annual Knysna (pronounced nice nah) Oyster festival. Ulises and I took the oyster company tour, which involved:

-An explanation on how oysters are farmed (did you know it takes 8 years for an oyster to mature?)
-What the difference is between wild and farmed oysters (farmed taste saltier and are usually larger)
-How to tell an oyster’s gender (it involves making a slit in the muscle, salt water, and …well who really needs to know that anyway)
-How to shuck and clean an oyster (pry it open, cut the muscle on the top, and clean by dipping the meat into salt water and agitating)
-How to make sure that your oyster is alive before you eat it (Never eat a dead oyster!) – look for the heartbeat or touch the edges to see if there is muscle contraction

After this lesson, I really never wanted to eat an oyster again, but I managed to down about 8 of them and some fish and chips as well. We rounded out our visit to the Oyster Festival by taking a photo with the 2006 Oyster Shucking Champion of the World - Eleki Ngcwangu– shucking about 30 oysters in 2 minutes.

We took a slow drive back to our hotel, stopping to watch the sunset, grab some groceries, and have coffee and cake near the southern peninsula in Knysna. It was a great day of doing nothing!

7/5/08
Today we headed out to Tsitsikamma national park, to get a glimpse of one of the only forest areas in South Africa. It is a beautiful park, created by large bluffs, which run like long fingers into the Indian Ocean, creating areas of trapped seawater and dramatic Cliffside waterfalls. We took a short hike out to one of the gorge suspension bridges, and watched some folks illegally climbing them. We then continued our hike down the waterfall trail, a difficult 3KM trail, over rocks and scrambling through the coastal landscape.

It was a good hike and we managed to get back to the car just in time for the rain to start. We were starving and decided to go have dinner at a place we saw on the beach in Plettensburg, and while all of our food – burgers, chicken curry, and mussel chowder – went down well – in about 4 hours it was all back out, and then some. Ulises and I have grown much closer on this trip, but there are types of bonding that no one should go through – tag team food poisoning is one of them.

7/6/08
With little sleep, no food but some water in our bellies, we headed out towards Jeffrey’s Bay – a sleepy little surf town at the end of the Garden Route, and the beginning of the Sunshine Route. We made excellent time – despite having a couple of baboons cross the road - and arrived early – unfortunately for us, we couldn’t check in when we got there – so we passed out in the car for an hour waiting for the guest house hostess to get back.

After checking in we basically slept for 8 hours, watched some TV, and ate some cup of soup. The most exciting day ever!!! Tomorrow we are off to Johannesburg and our transportation to Eco Training course in the Bushveld near Krueger Park…we must conserve our strength!