On Christmas Eve our plan A was to visit the Table Mountain, since the weather forecast said sunshine and no wind. Or to be honest…our original plan A (what the itinerary said) was to visit the Cheetah Outreach. But the thing is – because of the famous ‘table cloth’ you have to be flexible while visiting Cape Town.
If the weather is good in the morning (meaning clear sight and no wind) you should throw your plans overboard (unless you haven’t booked tickets to something else) and go to Table Mountain. Therefore Warren was happy to see that the weather was clear when he came to pick us up at the hotel at 9 o’clock.
However – when we were on our way to the cable car just a few minutes later, someone had gotten ahead of us. Oh yes, it was the famous cloth. Flexible as we are, we just took another direction and drove towards Cheetah Outreach.This is is an education and community-based programme created to raise awareness of the plight of the cheetah and to campaign for its survival.
But the cheetahs were not happy to see us. At least not me. One of the cubs was staring intensely at me all the time (through the fence) and when I changed my direction, he also did, until I went to a place where he could not see me.
Turned out that this particular cheetah had a thing for wheels (or the opposite of thing for wheels really). So I skipped the close encounter. So did Gry. Those of us who wanted to have a cheetah encounter went for the older ones without wheelchair aversion.
Gry and me (who felt more like prey) stood in the sunshine talking to other Norwegians. Yes, they are everywhere…
And we needed more flexibility that day, because the winery that Warren had planned to have lunch at, had closed down. And the 2nd, 3rd and 4th winery was closed because of Christmas. Gry (who never gets grumpy) was starting to complain and wanted to get back to the eternity pool.
Then fortunately we found Spier winefarm. Open! According to Warren it was a slightly touristic place. But hey, we are tourists. And it turned out to be a lovely place.
The lunch was perfect for us who don’t eat the (usual large) portions they have in South Africa. They had a buffet lunch, where you weighed your food and paid for what you had loaded onto your plate. I think we paid 400 ZAR (about 240 NOK) for 5 people’s food and 2 bottles of wine.
Compared to Norway, South Africa is not a very expensive country to eat and drink. On the contrary, it is actually quite cheap. And you get very good quality for your money. The problem is…we are all going to be fat when we go home. The good thing is – I brought 3 bikinis in different sizes. When writing this, I had already moved on to the 2nd…
And to continue with the food (yes that is what we do here), we had Christmas dinner at Africa Café. They are a very nice slightly touristic place (where it is almost impossible to hear for the hearing impaired) who serve tapas from all over Africa. After the meal, you get some African songs for dessert. And you can also buy traditional African pottery.
And those of us who were there, all agreed that it definitely beat the beer & peanut dinner we had in Rio de Janeiro last year… 🙂
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