First stop was the town of Stellenbosch, about 50k east of Cape Town.
We had a quick walk as a group around the town, before we had some free time to explore to the town on our own with most of us visiting the lovely village museum with its four lovely restored historic homes where you could see how the people lived in different centuries. Most interesting.
The town is very picturesque, so many pretty buildings in the typical Cape Colony styles, all (?? well, definitely nearly) in white. It felt so peaceful there.
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| Township on one side of the motorway while travelling to Stellenbosch... |
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| Cape Town Film Studios on the other side. :-/ |
Next stop was Franschhoek where we also had time for lunch. I didn't though sit down at a restaurant as most seemed to do, just grabbed some food from a local supermarket and walked around the town.
A lot smaller than Stellenbosch there were still a lot of beautiful buildings and I didn't want to miss a thing, plus the rather well known Huguenot Monument (didn't visit the museum though).
What I really adored was the old cemetery next to the monument, so many beautiful old tombstones.
I also visited the Franschhoek Medicinal Garden, a very informative place where you can e.g. learn more about how plants etc. can be used as medicine.
I certainly spent a lovely few hours in this town.
After that we briefly stopped at the Drakenstein Correctional Centre (formerly Victor Verster Prison), famous for being the location where Nelson Mandela spent the last part of his imprisonment and where a statue of Mandela was put up just outside the prison gates.
Next stop was at the Afrikaans Language Monument, which is located on a hill overlooking Paarl. According to Wikipedia "it commemorates the semicentenary of Afrikaans being declared an official language of South Africa separate from Dutch" and symbolises the "influences of different languages and cultures on Afrikaans itself, as well as political developments in South Africa, as follows:
Clear West – the European heritage of the language
Magical Africa – the African influences on the language
Bridge – between Europe and Africa
Afrikaans – the language itself
Republic – declared in 1961
Malay language and culture"
It is quite an impressive monument though you sometimes wonder where designers get their ideas from.
Last stop was at the winery estate Nederburg for a tour around the wine cellar and a wine tasting.
Anyone who knows me knows I hardly drink and if I do definitely not wine not liking most wine as I really do not like this dry alcoholic taste. Not sure how to describe it properly but if I like wine it is some of the cheap ones still tasting more of grape juice than wine. So no point in even buying some most of the time.
So the wine tasting was a bit blah for me, the only two wines I liked where the dessert wines at the end as, yes, they tasted very fruity and sweet (I even bought one bottle!).
Got told off by some in the group how I could buy such stuff but hey ho I just do not like other wine.
The tour around the estate and the wine cellar was certainly interesting. Yes, there is no romantic wine producing anymore as you picture it to be from past times, all automatised but that's how you can earn money these days to make a living.
After that we were already back to Cape Town. Dinner was at the hotel again and I sticked once again to the excellent starters while yearning for some seitan schnitzel!
