Winelands

We had a good guide for this trip. Ruth has taken-up tourist guiding after retirement. She was good driver and was well informed but occasionally became too talkative! We were only four tourists on this tour so there was no escaping the chatter.

The Paarl area is full of vineyards and our first stop was at Nelson's Creek vineyards in Wellington (the names strangely reminiscent of New Zealand). Nelson's Creek was a large vineyard of 400 hectares and was unusual because it had leased some land to its workers, Black South Africans I believe, who cultivated their own vineyard under the name "New Beginnings".

I had been to vineyards in the US, Italy, Australia and New Zealand and Nelson's Creek was probably the most generous in their wine tasting, which was conducted at the first building on the site (seen photo above) which is over 100 years old. In addition to the thick walls, the roof was also made of reeds, similar to thatch in appearance. The young woman who was our host first took us to the vineyard and then to the wine tasting. We tasted a number of reds and whites along with local cheeses. I was surprised at the low price of some wines, a nice Chardonnay costing as little as the equivalent of HK$15 per bottle. Later, we were shown how the wines were matured in oak barrels. Apparently, locally grown oak is not suitable for the casks because it grows too fast and is somewhat porous, so the expensive oak wood has to be imported.


In a happy mood after the wine tasting!

The Paarl area is beautiful and worth a few days for a leisurely stay. There are low mountains all round, with small towns, vineyards, and fruit orchards. Life in these parts appears to be relaxed and easy going. What disturbs the tranquility is the sight of a Black person waling along the road in the hot sun, even without the protection of a hat, or a cluster of young Black people sitting by the roadside, aimlessly, again in the blistering heat even when the shade of a tree was nearby.

We stopped briefly by Nelson Mandela's statue in front of Drakenstein Prison, where he spent the last two years of his incarceration, after the lengthy stay on Robben Island. Mandela called Drakenstein his "gilded cage", a halfway house between imprisonment and freedom. The then President of South Africa, de Clerk, would visit Mandela here and negotiate the terms of his release and the end of Apartheid. Members of the ANC (African National Congress, Mandela's political party) and Mandela's family were also present. Mandela's historic final walk to freedom was on February 11 1990. I remember watching it live on TV from Mobile, Alabama.

Mandela's statue at Drakenstein Prison.

We stopped for lunch at a small vineyard (the food was nothing much) which produced an amazing 100,000 bottles of wine per year from only 20 hectares. Later, we drove to Stellenbosch, which is a leafy university town. Because the university was located within the town, it had lots of small cafes, coffee houses, arts and crafts stores, and churches that provided a restful atmosphere. I felt that I could easily spend a year at the University of Stellenbosch, teaching English and enjoying a leisurely lifestyle.

A pear tree loaded with fruit

A lovely church in Stellenbosch


Campus of the University of Stellenbosch

On the way back to Cape Town, we stopped by for another tasting at the Spier Winery, which appeared to be more a commercial center than a vineyard. Spier is also known as a shelter for Cheetahs and we got to see some animals up close. Cheetahs are elegant animals and fast runners who can reach 80 mph. Because cheetahs take sheep and attack cattle, they are shot by farmers and only about 1,000 of them are left in South Africa. Spier takes on orphaned and injured cheetahs and nurses them back to health. They also train dogs that are then given to farmers. These dogs will bark and scare cheetahs away from farms before they could harm the farm animals. We chatted with a cheetah keeper who appeared to enjoy his work very much.

A cheetah with his keeper

On the way back to Cape Town, we passed a number of townships, crowded slums inhabited by Black South Africans. The first township, in Soweto, was established during Apartheid rule, but since the Black majority took over in the early 1990s, townships have sprung up everywhere. Apparently, the ANC encouraged people to move into areas where they had little support so that they could obtain the support (the votes) of such people at elections. These townships may have electricity, but they have few toilets and no running water. The township near Cape Town airport, seen in the photo below, spreads for miles and miles, and taken about 10 minutes to pass even in a in a speeding car. Although people have made these hovels into homes, as in the slums of Bombay, this is clearly not fit for humans. Indeed, the townships are South Africa's burden and shame.