Stellenbosch
SOUTH AFRICA
Into the Great Wine Open
By LYNDI
Friday, May 6, 2011
So what’s the first thing Aaron and I did once we’d rented a set of wheels? Headed to South Africa’s wine country.
Sometimes it can be a bit annoying when strangers give you good advice – only because I don’t take it.
Aaron asked the guy that worked in reception at our hostel in Cape Town where the best place was to rent a car for a few days and he mentioned “Around About Cars” have the best rates. So of course, we had to research each and every option that Cape Town had to offer – walking to all the different offices near Long Street to talk to them in person and see all the fine print – only to find out that Around About Cars really were the best. What a waste of a day!
But in the end, we had a brand new, silver Chevrolet Spark… Lite. I had no idea there was a smaller Spark, but we got it. So we crammed our belongings into the trunk (and by “trunk”, I do mean “rear glove compartment”) and the rest in the back seat, picked up a used tent Aaron found for sale on a local Craigslist, and we were off.
We arrived in Stellenbosch around 12:30 in the afternoon, so we set up camp at the appropriately named hostel “Stumble Inn” and grabbed a vineyard map of the area. The drive through the wine country in mid-autumn was beautiful – the vines were dying and colorful leaves littered the narrow highway.
Our first stop was a winery called Delheim that came recommended by our girl in reception (this time we did take advice from a stranger). In a cellar bar on the premises you can choose six different varieties of wine to sample for 25 rand (about $4). So we set ourselves up at a long wooden table and chose from an impressive list of options. We were even able to chat up the employee enough to distract him and get seven samples – so it was definitely a good start.
Aaron and I both enjoyed the Delheim wines, but the setting in the deep cellar with dim lights and 40 year old cobwebs in the small windowsills added a lot to the atmosphere. And yes, you read that correctly – apparently nearly all the cellars have a cobweb collection that looks remarkably like those cheap Halloween decorations that we buy and decorate our windows with – but with lots of dead stuff in it too. Nice touch.
Next we drove about 400 meters to the Muratie vineyard and got a similar deal of 25 rand for 5 samples. Apparently we got there just in time because about four different tour groups showed up within about half an hour and our host was running around crazily trying to pour for everyone at the same time. So we finished our last samples and headed back to Stellenbosch. The upside to having Sparky the car is that we can choose to go wherever we want whenever we want, the downside is that Aaron can’t sample too many wines without driving us into a ditch on the way home.
Arriving back at the Stumble Inn after an excellent afternoon of wine tasting, there was really only one thing we could do. Drink more wine.
We walked around the town a bit looking for bargain wine deals – which is probably a bit like walking around Whistler looking for bargain ski equipment – and when we discovered that everything was marked up approximately 200%, we headed back and drank the nice bottle that Aaron had picked up at a stop we made on tour. The bottle had somehow evaded us for a few days, so we righted that situation immediately and then spent a good part of the night convincing another traveler we met that he had to visit Patagonia in the middle of winter.
Wanting to take advantage of our newfound transportation freedom, we headed out the next morning to take a quick tour of the Cape of Good Hope – also known as the “Home of False Bay Where Great Whites And Humans Collide”.
I guess it’s not really known as that, but after all the National Geographic documentaries I’ve seen of Great White sharks jumping out of the water catching seals in their jaws, I couldn’t help but think all the surfers in the bay were just sitting ducks. Do they not understand that sharks can’t tell the difference between animals and humans until they taste them??? At any rate, with Aaron behind the wheel we headed out on twisted, coastal highways admiring the scenery (well, I was – Aaron was admiring the fine road so he wouldn’t drive off it) and small towns dotting the coast.
Our goal was a penguin colony just outside of Simon’s Town, so we pulled in to the public parking lot only to learn our second lesson of the road in South Africa (the first being – drive on the left-hand side) – you have to pay people to watch your car while you’re parked so no one breaks in. I guess technically, you don’t have to, but if a guy tells us he’ll watch our car for a tip – do his buddies break in the second we say no? Especially with all our junk in the backseat due to a completely inadequate trunk space in Sparky? At any rate, we pulled out a 20 rand note (which we were soon to find out is waaaaay too much. Doh.) and headed into the penguins.
Randomly, we first ran into a girl that was on the tour we had just left. She was our least favorite, so we weren’t altogether pleased, but after two weeks with her – what’s another half hour? And really, we didn’t so much have a problem with her – but her laugh did make me want to bang my head repeatedly into a wall. So we just didn’t say anything funny for awhile (which I’m sure Aaron will tell you – is really hard for him).
As we walked along the boardwalk, we found several penguins within a hands reach away – you could pet them if you were stupid (they bite), though we probably are not that much more intelligent because we stuck a camera pretty close and got our lens pecked. Which made the girl laugh, by the way. Not good for the camera or our sanity.
And even more randomly – we then ran into a girl I’d had on tour in South America over a year ago! She’s probably one of the only South Africans I know, and here she is on a touristy boardwalk at the exact same time I am on the exact same day. Weird.
At any rate, we saw another handful of the African penguins as we continued on, one was diligently building her nest running back and forth between branches and nest site over and over and over again, one was jumping, but most were just standing around. And then we were off to a small coastal town further east to prepare ourselves for a Great White Diving trip. I know, I know – I just mentioned how stupid people surf with Great Whites – but smart people get into cages and dive with them!
