Dani's Discoveries: Trip to South Africa

Ken and I are currently on a business/pleasure trip to South Africa, in which we joined a group of fruit growers to tour orchards in the Cape Town area.

I have been posting several pics and impressions daily on social media during our trip. In case you'd like to come along for the ride, here is the first several days' worth of those updates:

Day One

~ On the train ride from the Toronto airport parking garage to the terminal, we met a friendly pilot from Guelph, who acted disappointed that we were flying to London and couldn’t be on the flight he was piloting to Frankfurt.

~ Airports are prime locations for people-watching, if that’s one of your hobbies.

~ I wonder how long airline stewardesses have to practice in order to muscle those overhead bins shut like they do; to maneuver food and beverage carts skillfully in tight, narrow spaces, and to manage walking those aisles with such poise and balance even during frightening (for me, anyway) bouts of turbulence.

~ It’s nice that a multiple-hour layover provides enough time to enjoy a meal at a sit-down restaurant in the airport, and to have a spot of tea. The latter is quite appropriate, too, especially if said layover happens to be in London, England.

Day Two

~ Africa takes a loonnng time to fly over lengthwise. Though surely there are longer flights than ours to travel the north – south route above the continent, our journey from London to Cape Town meant 11.5 hours in the air. Sadly, there was nothing to indicate when we flew over the equator; I have nothing to mark the exact moment I first entered the Southern Hemisphere of the world, except the knowledge that it happened at some point during our flight.

~ I smelled Africa after we landed, disembarked the Boeing 787, and were walking up the ramp into the terminal. Not an odor or an aroma, exactly, but more like an intriguing mix of earth, humans, and heat. (Probably whiffs of our own humanity entered the mix, too, after 30 hours of travel!)

~ On this trip, I’m developing a habit of thanking every cleaning lady I see. It’s fun to watch their eyes brighten in happy surprise.

~ On the ride from the Cape Town Airport to our hotel, we passed by what I imagine is a shantytown. I saw a vast area of shacks lined up end to end and side to side, creating a patchwork of corrugated metal roofs stretching for what seemed like miles. The satellite dishes popping up everywhere among them looked so incongruous.

~ The first thing we decided about our hotel room when we walked in, is that we had lucked out and were given a “room with a view.” The scene out its large windows is a fine panorama of the city, with Table Mountain towering above it. Later, we noticed that on the other side of the hotel, the rooms have a view of Cape Town, with the beautiful South Atlantic port and waterfront as the backdrop. If we’d have been assigned a room on that side, we may well have said the same thing – that we had gotten a room with a view. Sounds like a win-win hotel, to me.

~ It was fun to begin meeting members from our group at dinner tonight. They are a friendly bunch, engaging easily in conversation about orchard topics, of course, but other subjects, too, such as hometown areas and family. I decided that fruit farmers are down to earth people, in many ways. Including literally!

Day Three

~ I hear a lot of apple terminology in conversations going on around me these days. Trellising, fertigation, fungicide, Retain and Harvista, bitter pit and scab – things like that. There’s been a host of apple varieties named as well, many of which I’ve never even heard of before. The most intriguing to me is First Kiss. Evidently, it is an apple with enough appeal that people have been known to wait in lines a block long for the chance to purchase a single First Kiss for $4.00. (think it should be $4 a peck, instead? 😉)

~ I knew that wild turkeys are pests in an apple orchard (they especially love Honey Crisp apples) but I didn’t know they have a special hankering for blueberries, too. One orchardist in our group told us that he’s seen turkeys actually jumping up off the ground to grab the berries highest on the bushes in his blueberry patch. His son shot a wild turkey that was being a nuisance on their farm, and when he butchered the bird for meat, he found its crop full of blueberries!

~ We got to ride to the top of Table Mountain in a rotating gondola, a first for us to experience that type of cable car. A cloud covered the mountaintop when we first arrived, but it soon drifted away as the sun burned off the fog, leaving a spectacular panoramic view of the city and the ocean beyond. We had a grand time hiking the rocky trails and taking pictures as we oohed and aahed over the sights.

~ Our group visited Bo-kaap, a section of Cape Town that is known for its brightly-colored buildings. Now a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, the area began as a place where slaves were housed when they were sent to Cape Town to work in the city. Back then, in the 1700’s, there was a rule that all their houses had to be white. When this mandate was lifted, and slaves could buy their own houses, they painted them in brilliant colors to signify and celebrate their freedom.

~ Knowing how easily I get carried away when it comes to posting photos, I began this series with the intention of posting one pic a day. One of my readers told me that since I am following Luci Martin’s example in doing a daily post while on a trip, I am welcome to also follow Luci’s example by posting more than one pic a day. If someone gives me an invitation/permission like that, I’m going to take it.

Day Four

~ We went on a Cape Peninsula Tour, which took us along a most scenic drive on the Atlantic Seaboard. We had lovely views at Chapman’s Peak, Hout Bay, and the Cape of Good Hope. I always thought that the latter was the southernmost tip of Africa, but I was wrong. In reality, Cape Agulhas gets that claim to fame, along with being the dividing line between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Anyway, the Cape of Good Hope is the most southwestern point in Africa, and it was an amazing place to visit, too. We climbed the cliff on stone paths to an old lighthouse, and would have loved more time around there to explore the hiking trails that had breath-taking vistas around every turn.

~ Seeing the African Penguins at Boulder Bay was a highlight of the Cape Tour. The rather small black-and-white-suited birds were so comical to watch, whether they were waddling around, preening their feathers, cocking their heads to one side while checking out another mom’s nest (I loved imagining the conversations that went on in the nursery section of the colony!) or diving and swimming underwater in lithe swoops. Ken read some fascinating info about these penguins. They get their drinking water from the sea, and use a special built-in filter to remove the salt, which they get rid of then by sneezing it out!

~ I love hearing the South Africans speak, especially the ones that have a distinct British accent. I got a kick out of our lady tour guide’s expressions, such as “it walks my mind” when she meant something puzzled her. She spoke very highly and fondly of a favorite food called biltong, a dried meat something like the beef jerky we’re familiar with. I don’t share her appreciation for it, but anyway, when she was describing the texture, she said its good for tearing off a big piece and giving to a teething baby “to gum on”. She also told us that a common phrase around here is “now now”, like you might say we are going to get in the bus and drive to the motel now now. Apparently, it “really has nothing to do with now; it just means soon.”

~ We drove by a patisserie named “The Sweetest Thing” and I pictured them offering First Kiss apples among the dear little cakes and pastries. Wouldn’t that be just the sweetest thing?

~ I smiled when I saw a young man sitting on a bench by the beach. He had stacked a pair of diving flippers, the one slightly slanted on top of the other, and was balancing them on his head for an improvised sunshade!

~ I wish we knew when and when not to listen to our guides. They told us to wear long sleeves when we went to the top of cool and windy Table Mountain, so we took jackets along, but we wouldn’t have needed to. They said we should wear sunscreen because the sun is hot at this time of year in the southern hemisphere, and we didn’t put it on soon enough and now both Ken and I have bright pink foreheads. They said we should not eat our picnic food outside at the Cape of Good Hope because there are aggressive baboons there who will come up to you and snatch food right out of your hands. So we dutifully kept our lunch sacks on the bus, and none of our food got stolen. But we never even saw one baboon, either. How disappointing!

~ We had a very authentic South African experience at dinner last night. There was a djembe drum at each place at the table, and a master drummer taught us how to use them. After the drumming session, and over the next couple hours, we were served small portions of 14 different foods, such as coconut and mango chicken, sweet potato balls, venison, and most unique of all – ostrich! Thinly sliced, it looked a lot like roast beef, and tasted similar, but was maybe a little sweeter. Both Ken and I really enjoyed it. (There wasn’t any dish that we didn’t like.) The meal ended with cardamom ice cream and cookies.

Ostrich meat

Cardamom ice cream and cookies

~ And I really need to get to bed now now. (So I can wake up at 2:30am and lie there, wide awake, for a couple hours. Thank you, jet lag, for being so clingy. ☹)

Some bonus pics: