What surprised me about our trip in January to Cape Town? Well, pretty well everything.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the first thing, given that I now have a new roof on the house in Jersey and I was delayed leaving the island (once again) before Christmas last year. Storm Eowyn arrived in the UK the same day we were due to leave (Friday 24th January 2025) bringing with it winds of up to 100mph near Glasgow Airport. Emirates told us on the Thursday we wouldn’t be leaving the next day, but had rescheduled us to go on the Saturday, so we lost a day and that meant we wouldn’t be able to pick up the car rental either because the firm, RentaCheapie, wasn’t open on Sundays (it’s all in the name).
I’d only flown Emirates once before, in 2008 to Mauritius and on the way back, I’d had wanted a stopover in Dubai to visit a former Deutsche Bank colleague. I seem to remember they were good but didn’t have a clear memory of anything in particular. However, they fly the A380 daily from Glasgow and I hadn’t flown in that plane before, they were cheaper in Business than BA, and the idea of not having a 12 hour flight was appealing, albeit involving a longer total journey but broken into two parts.
I didn’t think I could be surprised in a good way by an airline ever again but their service was superb (the A380 was luxury personified, and we even arranged for a driver to meet us in Cape Town at short notice and take us to where we were staying, given that we had no hire car). I now never want to fly long haul with any other airline ever again – certainly not BA who, according to a recent poll. have won the long haul race to the bottom.
Look at the number of Emirates A380 cabin crew! They had been walking round with bottles of Veuve Clicquot before serving lunch 😊
Another nice surprise was the welcoming, caring hosts everywhere we stayed. We picked most of our stayovers at random, apart from staying with our friends Gus in Cape Town and Garth in Swellendam who had recommended his friend Uwe in Barrydale. Everyone was so kind and the personal touches made that aspect of the trip really special. One example of this was that our first hosts in Constantia insisted on driving us to Sabine’s 9.15am lecture for the first two days until we finally collected the hire car on the Tuesday. The fact that four of our hosts were of German origin made Sabine feel even more at home.
Following on from that, the next surprise was to ask how could Cape Town be so congested? Tom Tom reckons in terms of travel times, it’s #3 worst in Africa, #106 in the world. We can attest to that – we hit gridlock literally after dropping the car off because there was a rugby match on at the main stadium. Poor Gus was driving. However, most of the cars were new or newish, there were a lot of 4x4s and a lot of Chinese-made vehicles most of which I’d not seen in Europe. Generally you got a feeling of relative affluence in a country and continent where any kind of affluence is in short supply.
The other side of the coin of course is that there is virtually no public transport (buses and trains) with the general population relying entirely on minivan taxis to get to and from work, the owners of which, so we were told, having shown in a recent strike of taxi drivers that they have the region’s economic activity by the throat. So our host driving us to the University was a true gesture of goodwill as we sat in a five mile jam the first day – he found a much better route the next day which we used for the rest of the week.
And to underline the point about no trains, I can happily say that we saw three trains the whole time we were there, two in Cape Town and one outside a place called Ashton. One of the Cape Town trains was a freight train at the docks when we dropped off the RentaCheapie hire car. The other was an almost empty commuter train (but it was a Saturday).
The strangest one of all was the Ashton train, a steam locomotive in a siding uncoupled from a full set of older style carriages. We’d followed a narrow gauge track seemingly all the way from Barrydale on our way to Stellenbosch when I saw it. It was so incongruous, given that we’d seen NO other trains, old or new. It seemed to belong to a completely different world (which of course it did). I had to research it when I got back and this is what I found it – https://www.robertsonr62.com/new-cape-central-railway – a fun thing to do on a Saturday next time we visit. The surprises just keep coming.
On board 😊
We did do two wine tastings (De Krans in Calitzdorp and Marianne Winery in Stellenbosch) and sadly didn’t have time for a third (Idiom near Sir Lowry’s Pass which I think would have been the best). The surprise with the two we did was that I didn’t really like any of their wines – none. However, our Constantia hosts put a wonderful bottle of Chenin Blanc in our fridge for our arrival (but we can’t remember the name). We had other lovely wine in restaurants, one of which was the wonderful red from the Constantia Uitsig winery that I’d really been impressed with on both previous visits to South Africa (2007 and 2009). It was, however, definitely worth going for the more expensive wines on the wine list (which in any case mostly weren’t very). And the food was fabulous and also not expensive. I’ll see if I can do a separate post on our culinary memories.
One of the most important aspects of the trip was the lectures that Sabine gave at the Cape Town University Summer School and I was not expecting the following that she had there. People signed up for her course (The Frozen North – Inuit Art and Culture, 75 minutes each day for 5 days) simply because they had so enjoyed her previous pre-CoViD lectures. She had a steady 30+ attendees and they were truly rapt in attention when I looked back at them. CTU has asked Sabine back next year. The comments to her afterwards showed how much they appreciated the course. We were entertained on separate occasions by four of her “students”, who clearly wanted to show their gratitude, and their hospitality together with their really interesting life stories were a surprise to both of us.
On that note, when I think back to the people we met, it was a surprise that, socially, we came across no-one black or coloured (a specifically South Africa distinction?). Yes, a coloured cop stopped us at a police checkpoint, and certainly we were served by blacks and coloureds in restaurants and at our various B&Bs. We noticed that a lot of the blacks in the restaurants were from Zimbabwe. But everyone we met socially was from the white, educated, older and retired, and relatively privileged section of Cape society. The life they live, albeit surrounded at home by varying levels of security, is a very good one by any standard and it was important to remember that not everyone lives like that there and I’d say that society is still quite divided.
Another surprise was that driving the 1000km on the Garden Route was so easy and trouble free, and at no time did we feel unsafe. It was all quite normal, contrary to what I had feared (but with no point of reference). Certainly we saw townships, both large and small, some seemingly ok but most awful looking, and while we struggled to understand how anyone could live in that kind of habitation, the people we saw didn’t seem bothered. It may be the old story of what you’re used to, I guess.
The driving took us through some stunning countryside, some with gently rolling hills and long views to the horizon; another landscape was larger rocky hills with the road following the valley floor alongside a river (and often an unused railway line). Quite a lot of the land had no evident sign of habitation or cultivation while some of the landscape reminded me of parts of the US I’d seen out west. At times, you felt you were really in the back of beyond, but still on good quality and not particularly busy roads. All this was a surprise, but what made it even better was the courtesy of the other drivers, who if slower than us almost without exception would pull onto the hard shoulder to let you pass more safely.
As you can see from the photos, the weather was not a surprise, thank goodness – in fact, it lived up to our every expectation. We had one day in Cape Town when it rained, but after the lecture we went on a wildlife tour that took us south over some hills towards the Cape of Good Hope, into dry and brighter skies. The rest of the time the sun shone, it wasn’t too hot (high twenties most of the time), it wasn’t humid and there was no wind. A complete contrast to what we’d left behind and would not look forward to on our return.
Talking of wildlife, another surprise was the variety of wildlife, not just birds, in the Cape Province. We didn’t mean to make the trip all about nature but managed to go on five wildlife tours of different kinds. Two were all-day in and around Cape Town after Sabine’s lectures with Dominic, The Fynbos Guy, taking in Kirstenbosch Gardens, the city’s sewage works (a particular favourite for birds and birders alike), and the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. We had a safari-light tour of the Idiom game reserve with the ranger, Andrew, (which is why we didn’t then have time for the wine tasting – you could say we had our priorities wrong) and in Wilderness we did an early morning boat tour of the lake. The last one was a simple walk over farmland outside Oudtshoorn with Lynette of A 2 Zebra Adventures (she also does tours of the Great Karoo region just north of where we were which would be on our list for next time). I’ll do a separate post on the wildlife we saw.
Andrew at Idiom, overlooking False Bay
And then there was the potter in Swellendam. His name is David Schlapobersky. We went to see the birds at the feeder in his beautiful garden with Garth and a couple of keen birding friends who helpfully knew what we were looking at. We went back to the pottery on our way out to Wilderness the next day and bought some of his wares. He was a little eccentric but Sabine in particular was very impressed by his work – a very talented artisan and, as we learnt, with a heart of gold. I’d love to have the urn as a feature in the garden in Scotland but, with our frost, maybe not a good idea.
Our particular thanks go to Gus for letting us stay with him and for looking after us for two weekends. It was also great to see his daughter and son-in-law again and meet his young granddaughters. All in all, an amazing 2+weeks which really was just a taster and we can’t wait to go back.
Pete's Perusings 