A Trip South

For the month of may I spent my time escaping the dreaded tropical heat of Taiwan and headed home to South Africa. There my girlfriend and I took a well deserved rest from working with midget drunks children. I would like to begin by saying a word about Cape Town, the capital city of the Western Province. It is an absolutely beautiful place and (provided you ignore the three blocks of flats commonly called the Toilet Rolls) one of the nicest I've been to. It's nothing when compared to Edinburgh, but was a delicate charm perched on the coastline and surrounded by mountains. It is also the only city I know of where the city planners are so useless as to put traffic lights on a roundabout.

The other lovely thing about Cape Town is how much greenery they keep in the city. There's a pathway one can walk down that goes right alongside the Houses of Parliament. On the other side stretches a long, but narrow, park called the Company Gardens. This allows for all sorts of oddities, like geese in front of parliament.

The park also hosts a number of pigeons and squirrels, including one evasive albino squirrel. Luckily I had my camera with me.

  

 

Almost looks like this squirrel is shaking his fists in anger, like a mid-fifties TV villain getting caught by the goodies.

We took one day and, with a couple of friends, decided to travel out of the city to a wine farm for lunch. The countryside surrounding Cape Town is rich with vineyards and many of the wine farms offer lunches, wine-tasting, sightseeing and stalls selling farm produce.

We went to a place called Babylonstoren: Link to their website.

It's a delightful place, nestled in a valley ringed by mountains, and everything served in their lunchroom comes from the farm itself. It's a great setup they have there and I was amused by their menu. They categorised their salads according to colour and were very broad on their interpretation of the word "salad".

The green salad was the closest to normal. It had a slice of melon with gratings of apple on it, and a savory pastry which contained spinach.

The yellow salad was more like a vegetable dish accompanying a main meal. It had bits of pumpkin and butternut, segments of tangerine and a smattering of gooseberries.

The third salad, the one I chose, was the red salad. It consisted of thin slices of beetroot and pink guava over which was scattered roasted nuts, granadilla seeds and a few edible flowers. There was also some salmon and plain yogurt.

My girlfriend and I at lunch. We were playing with the camera filters and ended up being caught in a halo of shimmering light.

After lunch we spent some time wandering about the farm in what turned out was their vegetable garden. We spotted virtually everything that went into our lunch (salads, main courses and desserts) including some very large, black, speckled chickens. The scenery was delightful and the sun high, though it was a tad on the chilly side with a wind blowing. I didn't care. Frankly, I was loving the cold weather.

Some of the outbuildings, including stables for donkeys, and a pigeon loft in the building on the right, in the foreground.

The edge of the garden section of the farm and the building in which we had lunch.

Nectarine Alpine blossoms.

Part of the garden with mountains in the distance.

Part of the garden where both vegetables and fruit are grown.

Me out in the garden.

My oldest friend.

Us being ourselves.

My girlfriend's oldest friend.