Of Wine and Sea and Ducks and Penguins

So, 7:30 sunday morning rolled around, the alarm went off and as usual after a night on the drink it took a second or two to get my bearings. The first question I asked myself after I remembered the all important "when" and "where" bits was "Why the hell was I setting my alarm for 7:30 on a sunday?". The answer soon follwed: time to get touristic!

After meeting an equally tired-looking Marcin for a fry-up breakfast (or as close to it as I could get in the hotel), we headed out to meet our bus. On the tour, we had an Irishman, an Englishman, a Pole, a Lebanese and three Brazilians. Am sure there's a joke in there somewhere! We headed out in what was now familiar territory, out past Clifden, Bantry Bay (thought I was back home here with all the place names!), Camps Bay, Llandudno and down to Hout Bay. The tour guide was explaining all about these places but I'd heard it all before so was concentrating on just staying awake. When we were nearing Hout Bay tho, the clouds started rolling in, and I started thinking "oh shit, here we go again". Seems this year, every time I wanted to do some touristy stuff, the rain decides to come along for the ride. Happened in Bandung, happened in Bali, Singapore, Galway with Sharon, and looked like it was happening here too. The rain held off tho, so it just stayed overcast - am well used to that! At least as well it meant that I didn't have to worry about sunburn this time!

Alto it didn't look very far on the map it still took a good couple of hours to get down to the cape (looked like no distance at all on the map, but then again I was comparing it to the size of the country...). The closer we got the more barren and windswept it got, and by the time we got to the gates of the National Park there I could almost believe that I was in a slightly scaled-up version of the West of Ireland, around the Burren (of course the cloud cover helped with that impression too). I suppose one windswept lump of rock perched out in the atlantic looks pretty similar to the next. Then tho I saw Zebras and Ostriches, so I knew I wasn't at home! Just as we got to the cape, the sun came out as well, which was a nice change.

I always thought that the Cape of Good Hope was the point where you couldn't go any further south on Africa without getting your feet wet, but it actually isn't. The Cape is off to the side a bit, and is the most south-west point you can go to, but sticking out about another mile or so is Cape Point, which is the bit where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic meet. Where one stops and the other starts I couldn't tell you, there's no dividing line or anything and they both look the same color, all you can say is that if you're facing the pointy bit at the end of the peninsula, the Atlantic is on your right-hand side and the Indian is on your right. I would have liked to have gone to the very edge and looked down but the path we took only goes to the lighthouse about 200m from the actual end. You can get out there, but it's aparently a 30min hike (that was 200m as the crow flies), it had taken us 15mins to get from the bus to where we already were, and we only had 45mins total there. Ah well.

After waiting about an extra 15mins for the Brazilians to quit taking photos (could have made it to the edge after all!), we headed off to Stellenbosch for the wine tasting part of the trip. First tho, Penguins! Part of the tour was to see some real life penguins in their natural habitat, at a place caleld Boulder Beach just outside of Simonstown. Am not sure are penguins by nature a fairly phlegmatic breed, or is it just that these guys are pretty used to tourists, but you could get to within inches of them without them batting an eyelid. So, being tourists, lots of pictures were taken. There was a bit of a distraction from the penguins while we were there, there was a duck out walking her family and one of the ducklings managed to get itself separated from the group, tried unsuccessfully to jump across a crack in the rocks, plopped into the water and looked like it was being dragged out to sea. At this stage you got a great look into the differences between men and women, all the girls looking on at the beach looked like they were thinking "Oh no poor thing!" and all the guys looked like they were thinking "Heh, he's toast!" :-) The next wave brought him back to shore again tho, much to the delight of the girls and the secret disappointment of the guys, who were probably hoping there'd be a shark cruising just off the rocks. Reckon those ducks got more pics taken of them as a result than the penguins did!

Finally, after our little bird detour, we got to Stellenbosch itself and stopped for lunch. Am not sure would I like to live there, is supposed to be a university town situated in the heart of wine country (recipe for disaster right there!) but nearly all of the buildings on the main street date back to the Georgian or Victorian period or even further back, and nearly all have preservation orders against them - would be like living in that show village beside Blarney Castle back home! We had an hour and a half for lunch so we split into two groups, the brazilians went looking for veggie food, as the girl in the group is a veggie (no surprise it was the girl), and the irish/english/lebanese/polish folks went searcing for real food. We ended up picking an indian restaurant (as you do when in wine country in SA). The food was good, but we forgot that it seems to be a feature of indian restaurants that they take forever to serve you - we were supposed to be back at the bus at 1:30 but it was only 1:15 when we got the food! Good food, just too bad we had to rush it so much.

And now the piece de resistance of the trip, the wine tasting! We headed out to the Zevenwacht winery just outside of town to get our drinking on! Our menu for the event was 5 glasses of wine and 4 types of cheese, as the place did their own cheese as well. I'm afraid I have to say that I was less than overwhelmed with either, the first wine we tasted was nice enough, but the rest weren't to my taste at all (nor by the looks of the others, to their tastes either). Were fairly small glasses as well, so even had the wines been nice enought to drink all of what you got, no-one was getting pissed on this trip! the most fun we had was winding up the brazilian chick about the cheese. Seems she was a veggie for moral rather than dietary reasons, and she was a card-carrying member of PETA as well, so we told her the cheese may not be vegetarian friendly as they could have used rennit from the cow's stomach lining to make it :-) The guide got cornered as soon as he came back to the table with the next wine, but was able to reassure her it was veggie-friendly so she didn't have to run out to the loo for a quick purging.

After the tasting, the tour. We were wondering why we had the tour after rather than before the wine, but as it turns out you'd maybe need the bit of alcohol to find the tour interesting. First was the "cellar", and while we were expecting a big cavernous cellar with arched roofs as per the stereotype, was just a big white room filled with barrels that was a bit cold. Lots of wine tho, 1,000 barrels holding a grand total of 400,000 bottles of wine! Not an overly bad place to be accidetally locked in for the weekend (if you liked the wine, that is). Then on to the factory floor, where "the magic happens". Now I know that there's not a lot to see when you do a tour of a distillery or a brewery, but still, is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory compared to this. Grapes come in on the left, get crushed, go into these big tanks to get the yeast added, then it's pumped over to some other big tanks to ferment, sits there a few weeks and gets put in the barrels. So, all you see is a set of big tanks with no indications as to what's in them. Wow.

After all this heady excitement, we all were ushered into the gift shop to catch our collective breath. Decided to get a bottle or two of the one wine I liked (the xmas shopping starts here!). After that, we all climbed into the bus to go home, a tad tired as we'd been going all day. So ended the first day's real touristy stuff in SA! Next stop, safari! :-)