Day 32 – Cape Town

February 23rd , 2008

Today we visited the wine lands in and around Stellenbosch, which is about 45 minutes away from our ship in Cape Town. We started bright and early at 8:30am, which was actually 3-4 hours later than I had woken up the last 3 days so it wasn't too bad. We started with a sparkling wine place called J.C. LeRoux. Sparkling wine is the same thing as champaign, they just can't call it champaign for some reason. They said it had something to do with the British but I can't remember exactly what. It was good though. They first had us watch a really cheesy video of the place and how sparkling wine is made compared to regular wine, then we saw where some of it was made, and finally we got to try out 6 different sparkling wines. All of them were good but there was an obvious best so a few of us bought some in the store then hid them in the bushes by our ship for later since we can't bring any alcohol onto the ship. Next they took us to a museum which was just four houses in Stellenbosch that were really old and preserved extremely well. Yawn.... Then our next stop was some more wine tasting and lunch. The area around this vineyard was absolutely beautiful. We stat outside the entire time in perfect weather overlooking the mountains and vineyard in the valley. Here we tried 8 different wines. I was sitting at the corner of the table and somehow had two glasses in front of me. I didn't think much of it until the guy pouring us the wine poured it into both glasses. The wine was all good so I wasn't going to waste any of it! Next was lunch. I can't tell you really what I had but it was delicious. There was meat, I believe it was lamb, covered in a chili sauce of some sort with rice and some kind of vinegar type of mixture that I just put on the rice. It was all amazing. After lunch we had a chance to look around the place quickly. There was a store with a bunch of glass blown art that looked so cool. If I had more money and a safe way to bring it home I would have gotten some. Maybe next time.

Our last stop was some brandy and chocolate testing. Each spot had four glasses of brandy in front of it with four pieces of chocolate. That is of course unless you sat at one of the corners of the table, where there were two of each. You can guess where I was sitting. The first brandy was pretty terrible if you ask me. At least as far as drinking it without a chaser or mixer of any sort. However, the last one that we had was probably some of the best brandy that I've ever had. I can't find the sheet right now that told us what we were all drinking but I'll let you know once I find it.

We got back to the ship right around 5pm and went to dinner right away then started slowly getting ready to go out.

The main strip where all of the bars is at is called Long Street. It's about a $45R taxi ride, or a little less than $7USD which isn't bad at all. The exchange rate here is awesome by the way. It's currently at like 1USD = 7.8 Rand. Everything is more expensive of course, like a cheeseburger and fries will usually be around $35R which is normal but you can easily get a really nice meal at a restaurant for $100R, or right around $15USD. It feels like you're spending a lot of money, especially when you go to an ATM and take out like $500R at a time, but then when you do the calculation it's really not that much at all. Kind of like monopoly money.

I really like Cape Town and the area surrounding it. South Africa is considered a developing country but that would be hard to tell being in the area that we're currently in. I noticed that there are a lot of round abouts everywhere, which makes for a lot less stop lights. During a couple of our trips, such as the one to the airport or on our way to the wine lands we drove past some very very poor areas. People that just set up shacks in one area which then multiply. One of the places that we saw was estimated at currently housing 1.5 million people. That's a lot of people. These were also the definition of a shack. We didn't see anything like these when we went to the Calabar community visit in Brazil.

The area that we docked in is a very touristy area. There is a pretty big mall, the Victoria Warf, less than a block away that you could find about anything that you want from the US. UNLIKE Brazil, I never had the feeling that people were just trying to get money out of me. Right when we stepped out of the port terminal in Brazil there were people trying to sell us stuff and get us to give them money. It got really annoying by the end. Actually, it was just annoying from the start. That didn't happen once in South Africa. This gave a much more clean, friendly, inviting atmosphere to the entire country. The streets were clean and didn't smell like piss either. Everyone that I met was very friendly.

English is a major language here but everyone speaks Afrikaans or some dialect of it, which sometimes adds to their British English accent. Being able to talk to people in English when trying to buy something or ask someone a question was actually something I had to get used to again. It was weird. I'm so used to saying 'cuanto es' to ask how much something is I actually caught myself about to ask someone that question.

South Africa has a very high crime rate, but the majority of the crime is reported to happen in the suburbs of Cape Town. I only heard of one person getting something stolen the entire time we were there so far, and that was when we were all drunk on Long Street.

Tonight we headed out to Long Street to check out the bar scene. The streets were packed with cabs and the bars were all packed with people, a majority of whom seemed to be from Semester at Sea. We ended up staying at an Irish pub that was playing all American music. They played anything from the 80's to new songs that we would hear on a hit radio station. The bar actually reminded me a lot of Blarney as far as its look. There was also people singing the songs or singing along to them, I think they were hired though since they stayed on stage the whole night. The main beer in South Africa is Castle, and it's not very good at all. I would rather have a PBR. Although, there is a beer here called Black Label that's really good. But if you go to the bars you're better off just ordering a mixed drink or something of that nature like a shot. The bars also stay open until 4am here, which is awesome. Not having a time constraint on the bar that you're at is much more convenient. We ended up leaving around 2:30-3. The bar that we stayed at as well as the two across the street were all packed with SaS kids, making it look like we just invaded the entire town.

It doesn't look like Scuba diving is going to work out this time around, there's just not enough time. We were originally planning on going tomorrow, Sunday, but we only wanted to do an afternoon dive. Where we were looking they were only offering two dives, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It's really not good to scuba dive on a hangover so we weren't going to risk it. I would rather feel 100% when I'm down there since there's so many things that could go wrong. This isn't such a bad thing though, now I'll have a lot more time tomorrow to do other things that I really wanted to do such as climb Table Mountain.