Africa 2024 5.0 Stellenbosch

May 04, 2024

When: 30 April to 4 May

Where: Stellenbosch and Franchhoek, Western Cape. South Africa's premier wine region which is about an hour outside of Cape Town. Stellenbosch is a major university town as well with about 30,000 students. A very different atmosphere than other areas of South Africa as Afrikaans is widely spoken here.

Weather: Generally beautiful. A few clouds here and there with high temperatures up to 30C. Steady rain on the day we left.

What: Wine touring and relaxing.

Who: The fab four. Also our host Dion and our driver Mawethu. We also met two Moniques from Mauritius. Shane and Steph knew them from their childhood in South Africa.

Workout: Hotel gym. Not a bad gym and got in two workouts (sleeping in far too late).

Walking: Very little. Just around Stellenbosch for shopping.

Wine: Many:

These are what we bought and plan to take home.

We visited three wineries on day 1 and three on day 3.

Whine: The wine tour is coming to an end :(. No more wine touring this holiday. But we did buy 10 bottles to take home.

Wtf: It rained one morning! Bloody ‘ell. Then it became very hot and humid. Oh well, we are in Africa.

Wild: Shane left her bag of newly purchased expensive jewellery, somewhere in town. They tried locating it from each of the places they visited to no avail. The driver then went on the hunt. Turns out, they left it in a washroom somewhere in town. A stranger picked it up and returned it to the place they purchased - the bag was labelled. They recovered their jewellery. People are good and its great to see such honest people all over the world.

Wildlife: Springbok at a winery. Guinea fowl at the hotel. A beautiful little sugar bird that is a close relative of hummingbird, but doesn't hum.

Water: Overlooking ponds while tasting wine. Also, it feels like we're hundreds of kilometres from the ocean, but we were actually only 12 kilometres away at one point today.

Also a small lake at one of the wineries.