Travelogue: Stellenbosch

This will be a short entry, covering just my last weekend in South Africa, for completeness. In other news, I've gone back and added a few pictures to the previous travelogues.

After my week and a half in Cape Town (and surrounding area), I decided to spend my last weekend elsewhere: WINE COUNTRY. Stellenbosch is a bit more than an hour outside from Cape Town, and is one of the larger towns in South Africa's wine country. I am, of course, a big fan of wine. So last Saturday, I took a tour run by my hostel, which drove me (and some others) to four separate wineries, each of which gave us tastes of 5 or 6 wines. This would be a grand total of 20, but since I was with a group, we also traded some sips with each other - plus, at one winery, I was being indecisive and the woman who gave out samples was kind enough to give me an extra two (small) tastes. At one location, we also had a cheese tasting (ALWAYS fun). So over the course of the day, I bought one very tasty red (Shiraz, from Fairview winery), one excellent sauvignon blanc (from Boschendal - yes, one of the wineries was in fact the location of the conference dinner, but since I really liked the sauvignon blanc we had that night I was happy I could go back and purchase it.) And of course, I'd previously bought a dessert wine at Delheim (which we stopped at during the after-conference tour). So I brought home a total of one red, one white, and one dessert wine, all three of which are delicious!

Regarding the rest of my time in Stellenbosch, I spent most of Friday just wandering around the town (in and out of shops, a local botanical garden, and finished with a delicious dinner from a culinary arts school's restaurant). On Sunday, I rented a bike and biked 10 km (each way) to Jonkershoek Nature Reserve, a nice little park where I found a picnic table and had a nice little spread (previously purchased for this very purpose). Just some cheese, crackers, figs, juice, and zebra pate. Yes, you read that right, ZEBRA PATE. I found this at an AWESOME little store in Stellenbosch (which allowed no pictures inside, alas) called Oom Samie Se Winkel (Uncle Samie's Store), which had the most amazing things. Like ostrich and peacock feathers, all sorts of spices, wine and odd spirits, random and obscure food items (like zebra pate), old books, and a full miscellany of old fashioned trinkets and oddities. If you ever go to Stellenbosch, go to this shop, seriously. Anyways, the zebra pate was interesting, but didn't have a strong taste (I could kind of imagine it was a little horse-ish, from the one time I tried horse in Europe, but I might have been imagining it, because honestly, it wasn't very high quality pate). So know I can say I've eaten zebra! But I had a nice picnic in general, before biking back. On my bike trip TO the nature reserve, I was cursing my lack of fitness, because it felt like rather a struggle at times. It wasn't until I biked back, however, that I realized that the REASON I was having so much difficulty on the way there was that it had been almost entirely uphill - even the parts that seemed flat were gently sloping up. There were some exceptions, but it was only REALLY downhill close to the park itself, when I was already tired. So on the way back, the uphill parts were the first thing (when I was well rested) and the rest was generally down, and so the trip back was an absolute breeze and felt like it took no time whatsoever! I spent the rest of the afternoon by (and in) the pool at the hostel, enjoying the sun for a bit more before returning to chilly New York the next day.

Not much else, my flights back to the United States were uneventful, taking 24 hours including the 4 hour layover in Munich (NOT enough time to leave and come back again). Just read, slept, watched movies. I was again impressed that Lufthansa gives complementary wine and after-dinner drinks to folks during the in-flight dinner. Watched "Wreck-it-Ralph" (I'd seen it in theaters, and enjoyed it a lot, REALLY fun movie) and Pretty Woman, read and played some games on my iPad mini. Normal in-flight stuff. I'm still not quite on my normal sleep/eating schedule, even 3 days after getting back to NY, but a 7 hour time difference IS a bit to adjust to - and it just means I'm waking up early and going to bed a bit early, which, while unusual for ME, means I'm actually on many people normal Eastern Standard Time schedules, where as usually, I feel I'm somewhere on like Mountain Time. So, back to normal now, and back to work!

Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa