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Published: November 1st 2009
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Lording it
Delaire winery near Stellenbosch, this is the view eating lunch The last time we were here in the South African winelands was at the very beginning of this trip back in December. Before we arrived then I hadn't known anything about the winelands, or the town of Stellenbosch other than it was close to Cape Town international airport, we like wine, it seemed like a good place to begin in South Africa.
Back then we went on a mini-bus tour of the winelands run by the backpackers we were staying at 'The Banghoek Place'. After this little taster at the vineyards and seeing some of the scenery we realised we should have given ourselves more time to explore the area. So now having a nearly a month free before we meet up with a friend in Cape town we thought we'd come back to Stellenbosch and do it properly.
Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl are three towns in a kind of triangle within the winelands. They are some of the oldest European settlements in the Cape and really there's not a lot here to convince yourself you are actually in Africa.
Imagine dramatic mountain peaks like the ranges in Scotland or Snowdonia. Nestling in between those are valleys of rolling green
Lording it
Cape Dutch architecture, Laborie vinyard near Paarl countryside much like in the English lake district only the climate here is Mediterranean, so replace the English farms with vineyards and the meadows with the lineal patterns of vines winding over the hills in tram lines. The towns have a village feel to them, church spires and the older buildings built in a European architectural style called Cape Dutch, in a way it couldn't feel much more like a sunny day in somewhere like rural Switzerland or France.
Lording it! Last time we were in South Africa I had thought to myself that South Africa must be the cheapest place in the world to hire a car, if you're happy with a small car maybe it is. This time we went back into Avis in Stellenbosch to ask about weekend car hire and they told us that they currently had an extra reduction on a Friday to Monday deal. It meant that right now you can hire a car per day for just under what it costs to hire a mountain bike per day in Stellenbosch over a weekend. That's silly but true.
You can't expect much more than a baked bean tin on wheels with an engine
Lording it
Laborie winery near Paarl for that type of money and that's usually what we got. Our baked bean tin had one helpful extra we didn't ask for. After parking up in vineyard car parks, stepping out and engaging the vehicle's central locking system it always automatically let off two sharp blasts of it's horn, loud enough to turn the heads of everybody else stepping out of their Alfa Romeo's and Mercedes to alert them that the peasants have arrived in their soup tin mark III. Thanks for that AVIS.
It doesn't really matter though because once you leave the car behind and step through the doors you get treated well whatever car you came in, at some places possibly too well, to the point of embarrassment even. Example: when or in what decade was anybody last ever addressed as 'Milady' in the UK? It was probably forty odd years ago at some society garden party in Buckinghamshire with the queen present.
"Can I pour some more water for Milady?"......."Would Milady like a little more wine?"
Lynn had to resist laughing out loud every time the waiting staff spoke at the table, thing is, now she won't answer to anything else!
It sounds
Cape town over the ocean with table mountain behind
Cape Town from Bloubergstrand beach. The coloured kites are people kite surfing, and a lot of fun it looked posh and it is, but also it isn't, you can turn up in shorts and flip flops and you'd still be treated the same. The South African attitude towards wine is a bit like the Australians, wine is just wine. The most we paid for a wine tasting was 35 rand (under 3 quid) and the least we paid was 15 rand (just over a quid). That gets you a decent taste of five of the wines the vineyard produces while they tell you a little bit about the grape and what it is you're drinking and why it tastes like it does. Most of these vineyards aren't big enough to export their wines so you won't have seen them before and the tastes seem to be totally individual at each winery, even if they are neighbours to the last one you visited. If you like a wine you can buy a bottle there and then, buy it by the crate if you want.
Better than this the vineyards are of course surrounded by lovely countryside, we spent entire afternoons at vineyards sitting outside eating lunch, enjoying the scenery and quaffing the wine. It sounds expensive but it's not, at
Me
for a change least it's not if you're spending the British pound. Usually it cost more or less the same as eating lunch at a typical English pub chain, where you wouldn't blink at the prices and then be served rubbish out of deep fat fryers and microwaves. And the wine, you're in the vineyard from where the wine was born, so even though they could sting you on the price because the views are stunning, they are still fair and it normally costs about the same price as supermarket wine back home. Hardly an elitist experience. Never has lording it been so affordable. That's why at weekends with the car we had to make the most of it and lord it like rotund Lord Nelson and his good lady wife on the eve of his victory banquet after the battle of Trafalgar. C'mon!
Cape Town is less than an hour from Stellenbosch and each Sunday I was able to say the words to Lynn "do you wanna to go to Cape Town for breakfast?"😊
Afterward we'd drive down the Western sea board of the Cape and spend the day at one of the beaches. Leaving behind the busyness of Cape Town
on the road towards Camps Bay it always strikes me how quickly you literally top a rise on the side of table mountain, turn a corner and suddenly the vast expanse of the blue Atlantic spreads out below you. The tempestuous weather system the Cape is well known for whipping spray wildly backwards off the tops of the incoming waves and the sun glistening over the ocean away out to the horizon. Even though this sight is always going to be there over the rise initially it's always a breath taking first view. From there it's a dramatic hour or two of coastal scenery on the cliff hugging drive down the Cape with lots of secluded bays and beaches along the way.
The next land mass beyond South Africa is Antarctica so although sometimes on Cape Town's beaches the sun can feel hot enough to flay your skin off the sea water is almost glacial, although people do still swim in it, especially the kids.
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