Stellenbosch is a town in South Africa's Western Cape province. It's
surrounded by the vineyards of the Cape Winelands and the mountainous
nature reserves of Jonkershoek and Simonsberg. The
streets are lined with cafes, boutiques and art galleries. Cape Dutch
architecture gives a sense of South Africa's Dutch history.
We're
just using it as a convenient handle for "wine country."
Our
ultimate destination was Babylonstoren, a five star hotel and working
farm / winery, but it was only a couple of hours from
Cape Town, so we had the driver stop in
Stellenbosch for lunch and a little shopping. On our big
trips, we're usually looking for a piece of art as a memento, and we
found it in a small art shop by wandering into the storage area where
they had pieces that hadn't been put out for display. It's a
painting of Table Mountain behind Cape Town by
Wilco Roon. Dave liked the
abstract representation of Cape Town, and it's similar in style to a
painting we picked up in Vancouver (of an alleyway rather than anything
iconic). Interesting story; if you look at the picture of the
painting below, you can see it gets more abstract and less detailed on
the right. Turns out Wilco was in a serious accident when he was
young, resulting in loss of sight in his right eye and apraxia; as a
result, his paintings are more detailed on the left side.
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From Stellenbosch, we continued on to
Babylonstoren. As noted
above, it's a working farm and winery, and everything served on the
premises is from the premisis, from meat and vegetables to herbs and
wine. They had more activities than you could do in a week, from wine
tasting (which we did) to making your own olive-oil based soap (which we
did not do). Roosters, hens, ducks, and other farm animals
wandered the estate, walking along trails between herb gardens, fish
ponds and vineyards.
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We only had a day and a half there. Part of the full day
was taken up by visiting the
Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden. Again, interesting bit of
information; the project began in 2009 when Lewis hired an excavator to
create a level play area for his children behind their house on the
farm, and began creating what would become a 7-hectare sculpture garden.
He apparently became fascinated with the capabilities of the earth
moving machinery and began to think of the entire landscape as a
sculpture. The end result was not only a display of his
sculptures, it was a place where the sculptures and the scenery around
them combined in fascinating ways.
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We returned to Babylonstoren in time to do a tour of the winery
and do a wine tasting of ten different wines produced by their vintners.
Followed by an invitation to purchase as much as we wanted, which they
would ship to the US for us, which I have to say was a fairly brilliant
ploy on their part because we bought $1000 worth of wine (no regrets).
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We spent one night at a hotel, Latitude 15, in Lusaka. We had Crocodile and Springbok (a kind of antelope),
which was really the only African-specific food we had on the entire
journey.
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The next day, we were off to Zambia,
taking a flight to Mfuwe Airport to start the safari leg of the journey. |
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