South America and South Africa

Dear all,

As the internet access in my hostel was on strike yesterday night belated X-Mas greetings to all of you around the world. May all your wishes become true!

I had a very pleasant X-Mas eve yesterday (remember, the important day for the Germans is the 24th) as we started our day with a visit of the Old Biscuit Mill food market in Woodstock. This is a market similar to the Borough Market in London, maybe somewhat more international then there, where you get all kinds of food for very reasonable prices. I started my X-Mas eve with a dozen of oysters for EUR 10 and a glass of sparkling wine for EUR 1,50 – nice! Thereafter chilling at the beach for a couple of hours and in the evening a very memorable stay on Table Mountain until sunset. Awesome! There is a meteorogical phenomenon that the top of Table Mountain is often covered with a thin layer of clouds in the evening. It appears as if one is walking in heaven as the clouds are below. Nevertheless the regions around the mountain are still visible (e.g. the city below, the harbor, the winelands in the East and the mountain range behind). It was really, really beautiful. Make sure that if you visit Table Mountain do it in the evening (or stay until dusk).

All the best to you all!!!

The five days before X-Mas Claire, Roberto and I did an excursion to the Garden Route along the coastline East to Cape Town and back on the Route 62, which is in the hinterland of the coast leading through a more mountainous area. The final half day we spent in the Wine Country of Stellenbosch having two wine tastings before the wineries closed. On our way to the Garden Route we visited the towns of Hermanus, Whale Watching capital of South Africa and Mossel Bay, which is a good place for Great White Shark encounters. However, we skipped both of the activities and were also not too excited about both towns. The whole region appears to be overly developed and I had the feeling it would have been good to be there 20ish years ago.

We made our first and second overnight stop in the decent little town of Wilderness, where I could do some paragliding. I didn’t know before about the flying sites here and close by and when about it I was eager to fly the next day. (Now Africa is the fourth continent I did paragliding.) I rented the equipment and went to the flying site “Map of Africa”, a soaring ridge with a landing zone right at the beach. The first flight was about 90 minutes and it was actually more difficult to get down than staying in the air but considering the 25plus other gliders in the air in a smallish site and that I didn’t have a reserve it was clearly safer to land than risking a collision.The day thereafter we went to Storm’s River Mouth where the strong breaking of waves impressed me a lot. I watched it for hours and didn’t get tired of the ever changing play of the water.

We chose to get back via the Route 62, a route that is considerable less popular  than the Garden Route but with a very different and according to my mind nicer appeal. I preferred it to the Garden Route as it is less developed and some of the towns had simply a friendly somewhat sleepy atmosphere. The night we spent in Oudtshoorn closer to Cape Town followed by an excursion over the Swartberg Pass and through the Swartberg Canyon the next morning. The strangely shaped rock formations reminded me of the lines of finger prints. We ended up in Montagu in a hostel where the units were former horse-boxes in a barn.

After traveling to Stellenbosch, the biggest and best known wine-producing region of South Africa we were there right in time for the wine tastings before the wineries closed. In the first one we had an interesting conversation with young winemaker about his philosophy of winemaking, what he would do differently than his boss, his view on the wines of the Old World and the New World, where he would like to travel to learn more about the wines, etc. I think we benefited from being the last customers of the days and that nobody else was around anymore. The other winery was one of the big ones called “Delheim” led by a German immigrant who was coming in the 1950’s to South Africa.

To summarize the excursion I must say these were some very pleasant days and the “backyards” of the country are also well worth visiting.

About 30 miles south of Cape Town is the Cape of Good Hope which we visited yesterday. Roberto from Spain was joining Claire and me and we had picked a very fine day with cloudless sky. Albeit the Cape of Good Hope is not the southern-most point of the African continent it really has something special, mainly also because of the many sunken ships close by. The “Cape Point” with the lighthouse is on a steep cliff and the seabirds were soaring in the wind that constantly blowed from the South. It was awesome to see with which speed they approached the sheer cliff, how they  slowed down the very last metres to finally safely land under the overhangs. True artists of the air.

The Atlantic Ocean had clear blue water and the beach right at the Cape was one of the finest I have ever seen. Albeit the water was quite cold due to the Benguela Current we were actually managing to splash around carefully avoiding to loose the ground below our feet as the surge and the rip curls were very strong. In fact swimming on that beach is not permitted and there are also no lifeguards. However, others were following our example and suddenly an entirely empty beach was “filled” with twenty people.

Yesterday night Claire and I and two others from the hostel were at an event that most likely I wouldn’t have visited if I had been in Europe: it was the “Christmas Carols and Candlelights” event in the Botanical Garden of Cape Town organized by the Rotary Club. It is a series of three concerts were families and friends gather for a picknick and after sunset sing christmas carols supported by a choir and a narrator reading parts of the nativity play while children are performing it. The organizers provide candles and the lyrics of the carols so that everybody is able to sing (guess who wasn’t). It was such a peaceful atmosphere with  these thousands of people sitting on a big lawn in the beautiful botanical garden, from some families several generations came together, the kids were playing around, and when the sun came down the only lights were those from the candles and the far away suburbs of Cape Town.