South Africa

This is it then, the last leg of our trip - Africa. Sort of a final frontier for us, with neither of us having never been to the continent. After 14 hours on the plane, having watched 5-6 movies and played some nethack we arrived to Johannesburg. Stayed quickly overnight in a hostel near the airport and come the next morning, hopped on a Kulula flight down to Cape Town where the weather was perfect and activities were plentiful. Not wanting to risk getting cloudy skies the next day, we took to the Table Mountain right after arriving downtown and enjoyed the views over the city for a few hours. Even beer tastes better when you have a splendid view!

Now, Cape Town is not exactly what I had imagined an African city to be like. European style cafes and bars all around - and where the hell are all the zebras, rhinos and huts made out of dung!? Anyhow, what a magnificent city it is; prices surprisingly low and indeed so much to do. It's not exactly Rio de Janeiro but good anyway. We explored the city on a taxi a bit and the second day went to do what all the good tourists do and visited the Cape of Good Hope and the penguin colony on the Indian Ocean side. Those little buggers in their tuxes get me in a great mood every time we see them. Also got to see some baboons in the wild around the Cape Point. It seems these guys aren't bothered about a crowd watching and taking pictures while they masturbate.

There's a lot of talk about how dangerous South Africa and especially Jo'burg and Cape Town are, but pfft, I don't think they would compare to some haunts in latin America. It's just that there's so many ignorant tourists here prancing around with cameras and thick wallets visible that there's bound to be trouble. Economic differences are still huge among the population even though Apartheid is long gone. And everyone seems to be a big comedian, even the staff on the Kulula flight (stuff like "Smoking and complaining are prohibited throughout the flight" being announced on the PA).

After a few days soaking up the city life we splurged whole 1.3e on first class tickets for a train and ended up one hour later in Stellenbosch, the wine capitol of SA. With some 365 wineries packed in a very tiny area, they boast thousands of different wines, some of which very nice. A wine tour we did included tasting 23 wines as well as a variety of local cheeses. Talk about good times! Naturally we did our best to do more sampling on our own, after all the small town is full of wine bars and shops both big and small. Very smooth time for 2 days. Really good value for money here, thumbs up from Fonzie for this place. But, the traveler in me wants to see something less civilized, so it is about time to move on.