There are tons of things to do in the surroundings of Cape Town. First of all there are of course the obligatory wine tastings. Cape Town is surrounded by tons of wine farms, and each and every one of them offers wine tastings for as little as R20. That’s about USD 2.
Somerset West, where we are currently staying, is situated in the middle of the Winelands and thus there is not more than five minutes to the nearest winery. Most of the farms also have great restaurants and they all offer magnificent scenery. As it is now time for the harvest, old stocks must be cleared out, why one can find quite a few bargains out there. Normally, though, we prefer to shop at Lars’s store (www.morgans.co.za) where one can find an excellent selection of wine at prices lower than at the winefarms. Lars’s company is also worth a visit alone. =)
One of the vineyards, Slayley (www.slaley.co.za), is now also getting in to coffee. Apart from making their own blends, they also serve magnificent espresso and lattes (among other things) and will soon also host coffee tastings. Well worth a visit!
Apart from wine, the Western Cape offers a magnificent nature. I have written before about our trip to Cape Point, but one does not have to go to a park to see spectacular sceneries. The mountain range going through the Winelands, the magnificent Helderberg that we see from Frank’s house, the beautiful bay in which Strand and Gordon’s Bay is located… they are all things that we get to admire and appreciate everyday.
Just as the rest of South Africa, the Cape Town area offers some really nice zoos. Near Paarl is the Drakenstein Lion Park, a sanctuary for mistreated lions, born in captivity.
The park currently holds about 20 lions, coming from zoos all over the world. The lions can’t be released back into the wild, but have found refuge in the park, spending their days in their large enclosures.
Near the lion park is a small place called the Butterfly World. It didn’t look like much from the outside and we hadn’t read anything about it… we simply found the waypoint in our GPS and decided to have a look. Inside the place was stunning and we walked around for about an hour looking at the incredible amount of different butterflies flying around. And also a flying dog.
After a while we realized that the butterfly enclosure only was one of several parts of the facility and we made our way in to the bird enclosure. Apart from birds there were also monkeys, iguanas and duikers.
I soon found a really cute bird and as it seemed rather curious and friendly I decided to chat with it for a while.
We did however have a slight disagreement on how long said chat should be, so when I decided to venture on, the bird (some kind of parakeet) simply flew over and landed on my head. There it sat until I decided it was time for it to fly off and tried to scoop it off. The result? I got bitten in a finger and one minute later it was back again. I simply had to accept my fate and spent the rest of the time in the enclosure with the bird on my head and back. Kind of nice, actually.
But there are also numerous events around town. Every Sunday there’s an outdoor concert in the nearby Helderberg Nature Reserve and a few weeks ago Lars were kindly offered us tickets to the J&B Met, a horse race sponsored by the whisky J&B. The event is the largest horse race in South Africa and was as much as fashion show as a betting event, since most of the several thousand spectators tried their best to win the “Best looking couple award”; a trip to Mauritius.
It was great fun to see the races and all the dressed up people, but a few hours in the scorching sun took its toll on my nose… Seem to get a lot of that on this trip… But, it was a great day out!
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