The Wine Lands, The Cape of Good Hope, and The Penguins

Yesterday was a fun day filled with lots of wine. It was the first day of the guided portion of our tour. We were meeting our guide for the first time along with our group. This is always fun as we had been guessing since we got here who else at the guest house would be with us too. Funny thing about that is that although we were expecting to be with a small group as that's what we booked, we actually have a fully private tour instead. Not what we were expecting but should be an interesting experience.

Our tour guide is an older gentleman named Michael, and he is one of the senior guys from Thompsons Africa. He has so far been really interesting, and because the tour is private we can bend it as we need. The weather although beautiful, has had some wind, which has already cancelled our initial shark dive, and now today the table mountain cable car was not running. Hopefully tomorrow will have reduced winds so we can get up.

Good news to report is that as long as it's clear on Tuesday morning Michael has worked into our already packed schedule the shark diving too! So fingers crossed we can still do it!

So let's see. With that out of the way, where to start. Yesterday as I mentioned, we went to the Wine Lands. Starting at 10:30am until we got back we were doing wine tastings and exploration of quaint little towns and vineyards. We started off at a place called Anura in the Paarl region. It was a quite nice tasting and we had some newer wines and a cheese board with their home made jelly.

They were all made on the vineyard and were quite stunning. If I didn't know they would likely get tossed at customs I would easily buy them. Mmm...cheese.

After that we went to the Franschhoek area and did some shopping followed by Stellenbosch for lunch. The university campus in Stellenbosch is vibrant and awesome for places to eat and drink. It actually kind of reminds me a bit of Streetsville but with a university.

We followed all of this with another tour of a winery called Vergenoegd. The director here was an amazing one who had a lot to say about the wine. Tasted a white wine called the runnerduck, lots of reds and a port. The name of the white stood out, and we were told to just wait...

Not a half an hour later we heard a noise...

This is what we saw:

Video:

http://www.abjm.ca/South-Africa/i-NMfq5Xq

Apparently they have this lot of ducks that they have trained and that eat the slugs and snails off the vines so they don't need to use as much pesticide. They know that in the morning they go here but to the pond...and then in the evening to go I front of the house and to their pen. Really cool sight to see, and really great wine. This is also the reason for the name of the white wine, runner duck. I normally don't like whites but this one was nice.

Not gonna lie I was pretty tipsy by the time we got back to the hotel. :) Slept quite well.

Today we were supposed to go to table mountain, and the cape of good hope as well. Definitely less drinking than yesterday was planned. Which is not a bad thing.

When we got up it had rained and was supppper windy. Thus the cable car was not operating and we couldn't go up the mountain. So we started by heading out to the cape of good hope.

Along the way we saw some awesome sights driving right along the water.

Audrey also made some friends...

When we finally got there it was stunning and there was two oceans right there! We took some pics and walked part of the way up the rocks. The air was so clean and it was just beautiful.

Finally here we went to the lighthouses...I say plural here because they built it initially on the top of the cliffs, but it didn't help because it was usually above the clouds so you could not see it. Haha... Amazing views of everything though.

After this, we went to see a colony of penguins....they are amazing little birds. Since Audrey is such a bird fan, she will post the story when we visit another colony tomorrow. Suffice to say I will leave it at a few pics!