Vineyard dreams

Just a twenty minutes' drive from the centre of Cape Town gets you here ...

the Constantia wine estates, where I used to walk my dogs. Did I take all this beauty for granted then? I don't think so, though now it seems incredible to me, a distant charmed life.

Here at Constantia Uitsig (above) is where I'd been dreaming of coming, in grey winter days in London, to sit on this low-walled stone terrace (below), with this view (uitsig) over the vineyards towards the mountains.

(rather more specifically, while tucking into their legendary tomato tart with a glass of Uitsig sauvignon blanc). And so all of this came to pass, on a perfect early autumn day shortly after we arrived, when the vines were already turning colour ... 

but the bougainvillea was still blooming.

(the prawns were pretty fantastic too)
A meander through the gardens between courses was all in order, since nobody rushes you here.

La Bella peruses the vege options, above; garden views and a glimpse of the interior, below.

A few minutes down the road is the neighbouring estate of Groot Constantia, with views down to the sea at False Bay ...

where you can drop in to taste and buy more wine, or have tea and scones if you're not totally over-indulged from lunch.

Groot Constantia is the oldest wine estate in the country. It was part of a massive endowment of rich fertile land in 1685 by the Dutch East India Company to Simon van der Stel, Dutch governor of the Cape. Van der Stel planted the land as vineyards and named his homestead Constantia.

But it was a later owner of the estate, Hendrik Cloete, great-grandson of a German settler, who put Constantia wines on the map in the 1700s. His Vin de Constance, made from Muscat blanc à petits grains, became a hit with European royalty. It was shipped by the crate-load to Napoleon Bonaparte in his final years in St Helena, as it apparently eased the misery of his exile, bless his dictator's heart. (Supposedly, his dying request was for a glass of the stuff). 

Jane Austen must have had a taste for it too. In Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Jennings recommends a little of "the finest old Constantia wine" for "its healing powers on a disappointed heart."

Today, Vin de Constance is reproduced, by the neighbouring Klein Constantia estate, using vines from the original three century-old plantings. With a history like that, how could you resist?

Beads & bottle-tops: rainbow nation creations

In a cobbled square in the heart of downtown Cape Town ...

... surrounded by historic buildings

... is Greenmarket Square, with a history going back to the 17th century when the first European trading ships berthed at the Cape of Good Hope en route to the east. 

It's been, more or less successively, a slave market, a trading place for goods and supplies for ships, a fruit and vegetable market, a parking lot, and a site of political protests in the apartheid era. 

Today it's a flea market with a distinctively African flavour, a venue for craftspeople, traders and dealers to sell their wares. 

In the maze of tightly packed stalls you can find everything from clothes, masks, hand-painted fabrics, glassware and curios, to a range of creative artefacts made from recycled materials ...

Batik paintings, wooden bowls and soapstone heads, above, and below right, chickens made from coloured plastic bags, porcupine quills, paper maché bowls made of labels of canned pilchards, wire and bead bowls.

Boy lost in thought (I liked his hat), above, and Zulu glass bead ornaments, below.

Colourful animal creations made of wire, beads and cans, below.

A Sengalese trader, below, shows off his collection of wooden masks from West Africa.

Anxious about sales?

No worries here ...

Buying and selling is only half of the story, though. This is a social and sociable place ...

(pull up a drum if you can't find a seat)
 a space to meet, hang out and chat ...

see and be seen in colourful threads ...

looking sharp ...

This man (below) demonstrated his battery-operated radios made entirely of telephone wire, bottle tops and strips of cans with a resurrected antenna ... they work perfectly!

T-shirts and ganja were on the menu here ...

This elderly craftsman, below, was busy making sculpted heads from stone ...

burnished, polished and painted ...

... the finished products laid out to dry on newspaper ...

What did we buy?

That will have to wait for another day ...

Boulders, penguins, and the world's best fish & chips

A troublesome internet connection at the place we stayed in while in Cape Town made uploading photos onto my blog almost impossible. Since I took about a million pics, though, and have an equal number of good memories of our trip, there may well be a truckload of posts from here on ...

Boulders Beach was one of the first places Younger Daughter and I wanted to head off to on a sunny day right after we arrived. Boulders is a little sheltered cove near Simon's Town, as you drive the coastal road along this rugged stretch of the peninsula ...

towards Cape Point ...

This is not one of the Cape's famous sunbathing beaches like trendy Clifton or secluded Llandudno. It's part of the Table Mountain National Park, which includes the whole peninsula mountain range that you see above.

It's aptly named, and also the protected home of a growing colony of about 3000 African Penguins, now thriving after near-extinction. 

These are much smaller than the big Emperor penguins of the Antarctic, and awfully cute little fellows. They're much loved by local residents, who take care to check under their cars for stray penguins that wander out of the protected area from time to time.

We watched them taking little solo waddles in the sunshine, napping in the shelter of rocks, hanging out and shooting the breeze with mates, and even mating (top left - these exemplary males are monogamous, mating for life and even taking turns to sit on eggs and feed their babies!).

They are also quite hospitable about sharing their space with visiting humans, and happy to let us get pretty close, providing one shows them due respect ...

So distracted were we by the pleasures of sharing a spot of sunshine with the penguins that we didn't notice the tide coming in ...

... and had to do some fairly hectic rock-climbing

to get back to the main beach ...

(bottom left is a dassie (rock hyrax or rock rabbit) sunning himself on a rock, appropriately enough, and bottom right the beach house I fancy).

Lunch was on the upstairs terrace of The Meeting Place, our favourite café/deli in Simon's Town ...

... with this view over the harbour. Simon's Town is a naval base, hence the serious-looking ships behind the yachts. (And in the foreground, Salty Sea Dog - home to outrageously good fish & chips) ...

For the drive back we took the high road, along Boyes Drive, with fabulous views of the coastline and endless stretches of beach ...

African welcome

 What are the first things that strike one, returning to Cape Town after a few years in the northern hemisphere?

1.  The light. Yikes, it's bright! I feel like a mole that's just tunneled out from the gloom.

2.  The accents - once part of the local landscape, they now strike the ear with all their variety.

3.  The warmth and friendliness of people (and, after England, their slightly shocking, but so welcome, directness).

 View of Table Mountain from Cape Town's Waterfront yesterday

Day one -

which should, by rights, have been day two, were it not for a tricksy little valve on a reserve fuel tank that grounded our intended flight and had us chugging home on the M25 in the middle of the night, just around about the time we should have been winging it over the Sahara -

- we moved into Cape Town's historic Waterkant area, on the slopes of Signal Hill, overlooking the harbour. Part of the 'Malay Quarter', so-called because  it was originally settled and built by freed Muslim slaves from the East in the 1700s.

It's now a vibrant area of steep cobbled streets, characteristic architecture and interesting shops and places to eat, with views down to Table Bay

So many new shops to indulge my nostalgia for African artefacts  ...

and old favourite places to stop for tea ...

La Petite Tarte in the Cape Quarter adds a French touch to the mix of cultures

 Wheat free chocolate and hazelnut cake and a cup of Mariage Freres thé de l'opéra on the little covered terrace


And then back 'home' for a dip in late afternoon sunshine ...

 It doesn't get much better than this ...