Stellenbosch and the Winery Tour

As you know, Ozell and I did not want to spend our last week in South Africa just in Johannesburg.  Ideally, we would have liked to have gone to Victoria Falls in Zambia and/or to Mozambique.  Unfortunately due to cost and other logistics, we did not make it to those places.  Not going to Victoria Falls was a bummer since we both had that very high up on our list for places to visit in Africa.  But I do not have too much regret because of our trip to Iguacu Foz in Brazil.  Victoria Falls has a very similar look and scale to Iguacu.

 

We did find a reasonable round trip ticket to Cape Town so we headed there since we knew we would not be prisoners in our hostel.  One of the nice things about returning to Cape Town was that we were able to take a winery tour in the Stellenbosch area outside of Cape Town.  Stellenbosch is analogous to Napa Valley in California.  We stopped at four wineries for tastings (usually 5-6 different wines of our choosing).  We also had a nice cheese tasting at the first winery.  I was also able to smoke a couple joints during a couple of our stops.  The strange thing was that neither of us liked any of the wines.  It was very strange considering how much we have enjoyed the wine in South Africa and had bottles from some of the same vineyards during our previous meals.  This is not to say that the day was not enjoyable.   We both expected that we would buy a bottle or two to bring back to the hostel, but we did not buy any wine at all.

 

Stellenbosch is a rural, university town.  It is just 45 minutes outside of Cape Town and is pretty idyllic.  It reminds me a lot of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  The streets were tree lined and the fall colors were starting to show.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean