Month: March 2018

March 6

The next morning we got up early again for another day trip – this time to Botswana! The Chobe river is a river that feeds into the Zambezi and is home to Chobe National Park which is full of incredible animals. The visa we had purchased in Zambia covered Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana and is specifically designed for people like me and Michael who want to do this day trip to Botswana. Perfect!

One of the things that was different about the Victoria Falls area compared to other African cities we had visited was that the animals seamlessly mixed with the cities. It did not seem like anyone was trying to keep the animals out of town. There were baboons and monkeys everywhere. They just hung out on the roof of our hotel – you could hear them walking on the roof the way you can hear squirrels walking on your roof back in the US. Random wart hogs roamed the town. Every few miles you saw a new animal crossing sign. Baboon Crossing. Elephant Crossing. Here you have a random herd of elephants crossing on our way to Botswana:

After about an hour drive, we had seamless entry into Botswana and headed to the starting point for our tour. The first half of the tour was a river cruise on the Chobe and the second half was a game drive, with lunch stuck in between.

The river cruise was perfect. Really perfect. It was great being on this huge pontoon boat. Since Michael and I both grew up with family lake houses that had pontoon boats (albeit much smaller), there was something very comforting and familiar about being on that boat. Same with heading down the river – it made both of us think of the Au Sable river that feeds from Lake St. Helen and it made me think also about some of the rivers in Missouri that I had gone floating on. It was bigger, but a very familiar feel that made me equal parts miss home and really happy to be there.

On the cruise we saw elephants, crocs, hippos, Cape buffalo, Impala, Puku and a bunch of birds.

Monkeys:

Red Bishop:

Pide King Fisher:

Impala:

African Fish Eagle:

Some impala super close to a croc. Michael wanted an attack so bad!!! But it didn’t happen while we were sitting there.

Woodland King Fisher:

African darter:

The cool thing about these hippos: we may have got a little too close to them and two of them jumped out of the water at our boat and the captain pulled back the boat. It was the most movement we had seen from a hippo in our month and a half in Africa. A little scary, but amazing. Definitely did not get that on video unfortunately. So instead you get a picture of this lazy hippo.

And then we saw a hippo out of water later that was super cool:

And some salty Cape Buffalo

We grabbed lunch back at a lodge and were treated to local beer, called… St. Louis! It tasted like bud ice… in a good way?

Then we got into a familiar seat on a Land Rover and headed out for a drive.

Kudu –

Malibu stork (an old friend from the Serengeti)

Solo adult male Steambok – a little bigger than a dik-dik and clearly less cute

Blue chick bee eater

Carmine bee eater

Cattle Egrit on the back of the buffalo and an Ox pecker on the face which is hard to see. The Ox pecker will eat ticks and bugs off the buffalo and the egrit will eat bugs that are disturbed and fly up as the buffalo walks.

Here is a herd of impala and a reminder than only the women stay together and will mate with just one male. The men fight for the herds, so you’ll see the strongest male with the herd of females and then you’ll see an entire group of bachelors together feeling sad. Can you see the one male here?

How cute are these baby elephants?

We didn’t see any leopards or lions which was ok for us, but I was a bit bummed for the others in the car. We are just coming off such an embarrassment of riches as far as animals are concerned. It was a really great day trip, but it was no Serengeti. We did, however, see this leopard… tortoise

Also we saw a bunch of super cool dung beetles:

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_7716.mov

A lot of people were leaving the park all at one time, trying to make it back to the border before closing when our line of trucks came upon this herd of elephants. One of the first trucks tried to pass through, eager to make it on time to customs. What he ended up doing was splitting the herd on either side of the road and enraging a few of the elephants who became very aggressive with the trucks. We only then realized how large the herd was and that they were really surrounding the trucks. We all felt really bad being in the middle of this and causing so much anxiety. This is one tiny video that does not do it justice. It was sad and a tiny bit scary.

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_7763.trim_.mov

After our close encounter with the elephants, our game driver took us straight to the border at the end of the drive. Everyone went through customs to leave Botswana. This is where we hit our snag.

Customs Man: You don’t have a passport

Jane: Yes I do – it’s in your hand

CM: this is not a passport

Jane: Yes it is

CM: no it is not
Mike: It says passport right on the front.

CM: but it’s not a real passport

Jane: Yes it is

CM: It’s an emergency passport

Jane: right – I ran out of passport pages and had to get this one

CM: so it’s not a passport

Mike: it is a passport – it says it right on front.

CM: it has an E listed on it

Mike: no it doesn’t

CM: you shouldn’t have been let into Botswana this morning because you don’t have a visa

Jane: (points to visa) it’s right there.

CM: that’s not for Botswana

Jane: that’s not what we were told.

CM: well it only works for Botswana if you have a valid passport and you don’t

Mike: It is a valid passport

CM: no it’s not. And since you don’t have the proper documentation you should have paid for a visa.

Jane: how much does the visa cost

CM: a lot.

This stuff went back and forth for about five minutes. CM then said something about a visa costing like $200 or something, but I didn’t totally understand him. At this point both Michael and I are getting very upset. We just basically need this guy to let me leave his country. He starts yelling at us.

CM: do you want to make this harder? We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Jane: (trying to talk in a softer calmer voice) no – let’s do it the easy way

CM: (grumbles something in his native language, mean looks at us, stamps my passport and huffs off)

We didn’t pay anything additional and we got to leave, but I was really upset and Michael was furious. I’m not sure what CM’s deal was, but it seemed like he was just trying to put me in my place. It was really the first time that I felt like perhaps all of the things being said in the US about Africa by our leader had finally affected us. That said, besides being yelled at, we still were able to go on our way without paying for an extra visa.

So it was a really great day that ended a little rough. Michael said it left a bad taste in his mouth about Botswana, but I think it’s one of those things that you just let slide off, especially after such a great day.

We got back to our hotel and just went straight to bed. It was pretty early but we were exhausted. If anyone is keeping count here, this is day three of us being too exhausted to get through the day without naps or early bed time. We were both starting to get a little worried that we were so exhausted. We were also super dehydrated. That’s something we can understand when we’re in wine country sampling all day, but here we were drinking a ton of water and still showing signs of dehydration. Ugh. Time to google. Turns out that the malaria meds that we are taking cause dehydration, creepy dreams, and exhaustion, among other things. We started taking them on January 31st. So over a month on the meds without any breaks and we were finally feeling the effects. Good news: Zimbabwe is the last country that we need to worry about malaria, so another 7 days and we’re in the clear!

March 4-5

We begrudgingly left Cape Town and continued on to our next big sight: Victoria Falls! With just 4ish days in the area, we were getting a lot of country bang for our buck. We flew into Zambia, drove over the border to Zimbabwe and then spent some time on a day trip to Botswana. So three countries, four days, but could do them all without packing our bags any additional times.

When we arrived in Zambia, we did our usual visa dance: walk up to customs, they ask if we got our visa in advance, we say no, they deep sigh and tell us how much it costs, we tell them we don’t have any cash, they tell us we can pay in USD, we tell them we don’t have any USD, they deep sigh again, we ask if we can use credit card, they deep sigh and say the machine isn’t working well (or they don’t take it at all), they try to run the card, it doesn’t work, they try again, it doesn’t work. At this point, either Michael tries to convince them to let him go out past customs to an ATM or the card magically works on the third try. I don’t remember what happened in Zambia… most of our customs experiences are starting to blur together. Not all of them – we had an extra special experience two days later in Botswana.

After leaving the airport, we needed a taxi to our hotel. We had picked up some local Zambia currency, kwacha, (the only currency available at the airport) and went out to see what the drivers had to offer. Good news: there were taxis. Bad news: they only take you to the border. Then you have to get a second taxi. So that’s what we did and that’s when things got a tiny bit messy. We got out of Zambia customs, and were told it was about a mile and a half to the Zimbabwe customs. So really we were going to need 3 taxis to get this job done. We had been told that we couldn’t use kwacha for Zimbabwe taxis, so we changed it all except for the 20 kwacha we needed to get to the next customs stop. We asked around and were told it was going to be 40 kwacha to go that mile. Nope. So we started walking. And it started raining. Michael was about ready to cave and go back when our taxi driver pulled up behind us. 20 kwacha it was. We don’t usually feel like we win when negotiating with taxis. But that felt like a win to me. Another round of customs, another taxi and we were at our hotel for the next couple of days.

It wasn’t terribly late, but we were exhausted, so we hung out at the hotel, had dinner and went to bed early.

The next day we went white water rafting on the great Zambezi river. I had been looking for a chance for us to go white water rafting over the past couple of months and it had never worked out. I hadn’t been since our honeymoon in Costa Rica and Michael since a bachelor party in Denver. We were due. Plus how cool is it to go white water rafting on the river that feeds Victoria Falls!?!

The Zambezi River is Africa’s fourth longest river (2,693 kilometers) after the Nile, Congo and Niger. Here’s a video of a stretch we were rafting on:

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_7771.mov

Just kidding! That was right at the base of the falls and we did not raft on that. We rafted a few miles down the river once things had calmed down a bit.

The day started at 7am and involved a lot of work to get on the water. About an hour and a half of driving, an hour of waiting, and a 20 minute challenging hike down the gorge to get to the water. But then we were on the water and it was great! It wasn’t the best rapids – 2s and a few 3s (one of which they called a 5). But it was still great being out there. The river was beautiful and the water was a great temperature. No pics since we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay the 45 bucks for their photos.

We got back to the hotel early afternoon and were going to head out to see the falls, but we were so tired. We napped a few hours and then headed into town for a quick dinner. While in town we found the place where they do cage diving with Crocodiles. This is a thing apparently. It sounds stupid and dangerous to me. It sounded more stupid when we found out that it’s just some crocs that they keep in a tank. This tank was just the size of a small pool next to a bar. No thank you.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Frank Zappa that I liked a ton that was on the wall from the brewery we had dinner at:

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

March 2-3

Sorry for so many posts all together. Michael and I had a four hour road trip today when I could type out the posts and now my wifi is killing it in our AirBNB, so I’m just cranking them all out. When it rains it pours! Back to wine country.

Stellenbosch Hills – Started our day with a biltong/wine pairing. Biltong is just jerky, but the interesting thing about biltong in South Africa is the odd varieties of biltong: ostrich, beef, springbok, kudu. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of jerky, but the kudu and the beef drywors (no clue what that means) were both delicious and the wine pairings were interesting. The guys, being bigger jerky fans, really enjoyed it.

Raats – Here we had this local college student pouring the tasting. In my mind he was the most interesting thing about this winery. He is a buddy of the winemaker’s son, was very charismatic, apparently doesn’t go to class but still gets A’s and sold both the wine and the family really well. He made the tasting a lot of fun. We liked all of the wines, but one thing to note is that the last wine we tasted is used as a pairing at Eleven Madison Park in NYC which is one of the top restaurants in the world.

Jordan – we had a tasting scheduled here, but needed lunch, so we switched to having lunch at their bistro instead. The food was great, beautiful setting and we enjoyed the wines as well.

Maryanne – this was my “I’m super tired from drinking wine all day” espresso stop. After I got that out of the way, there were some great wines, but the best thing about this winery is that the four of us had some notably good conversation on a wide variety of topics that would normally get people heated. But no one got heated – it was just great conversation.

Asara – we did dinner here with wine. Asara was one of our favorites from the last time we were in Stellenbosch and we loved it. A lot. So we were a little nervous about coming back, but it did not disappoint. The food was incredible and the wines held up again. We started off with their white cabernet which was delicious. Michael had a glass of Cape Fusion, delicious. Bell Tower, spot on. Avondale, incredible.

It was really wonderful being back at Asara. We looked into staying there for our one night in Stellenbosch but it was too expensive. Next time, for sure.

Day 2

Stark Conde – this was a great way to start off our last day in wine country. They had a great outdoor space set up for breakfast, but we headed inside to the barrel room for a tasting. The woman who poured our tasting was really knowledgeable and was a huge value add to the tasting. The wines were delicious but what I liked was that their cheapest Sauv Blanc was my favorite of their whole list. I think it ended up costing like 6 or 7 bucks. That’s a case that I would have liked to take home if we were heading back to the states now.

Waterford – Another favorite from our last visit. Phil and Krystal had recommended the Jem to us, so last visit we did a wine and chocolate pairing and had a glass of the Jem. Obsessed. This made us pumped to go back.

This time we did the reserve tasting: we had the 2009 Chardonnay, the 2006 Jem and the Kevin Arnold 2005 Shiraz and 2006 Cab Sauv. Reminder that if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We should have done a chocolate tasting and a glass of the Jem. All four of the wines were good, but none were amazing. The 2006 Cab Sauv was Michael’s favorite. Probably mine too. Next time: glass of Jem and chocolate and wine pairing.

Waterkloof – Last time we went to Waterkloof, we had an incredible lunch and did a Merlot tasting that compared the 2006 to the 2009. It resulted in us buying 3 bottles of each – both were really really good. Popping back in here, we couldn’t do lunch, so we did a tasting with a cheese and bread platter.

The wines were good, but not as good as last time. We are thinking they may have grown a little too big or something. Or perhaps they’re selling more, so the wines they gave us are newer than what we had relative to the last visit. We’re not sure, but the best thing from that tasting (and the only thing that Vanessa bought) was the mango chutney that they had on the cheese plate and that was sold at the deli down the street.

So after having such an amazing trip to Cape Town last visit, we were worried that it wouldn’t hold up to what we remembered. It definitely did! Things changed and some things weren’t as good as we remembered, or had changed (as things do). But for everything that was slightly less good, we found 3 new things that were incredible. Sorry for my over use of the word delicious. I know it’s a boring word that does not properly describe what we were eating and drinking, but short of taking notes as we’re tasting (which I refuse to do), you all get either a “delicious” or a “meh” as my main descriptor.

We still love Cape Town and it is still our favorite city in the world. If it was closer to family, we’d probably move here, but the distance is too much. So, we’ll see you soon, Cape Town! Thanks for still being wonderful!

February 28 – March 1

Before getting out to wine country, there was still one thing that we hadn’t done in Cape Town yet. We hadn’t been able to get down to Cape of Good Hope. So we woke up super early, packed up all our stuff, left the AirBNB around 5am and headed around the cape. Our goal was to catch Cape of Good Hope for sunrise. Huge success.

This is Cape Point which you can see from Cape of Good Hope

We also got to see these animals – we weren’t totally sure what kind of bok they were, but since Jeff and Vanessa hadn’t seen many animals and weren’t going to have time for safari, every animal that we saw made me excited for them.

We also got an up close view of some ostriches!

Then off to a really cutesy bakery, Schoon, for some breakfast. It was my first flat white which I had heard a bunch about (and was delicious) and it was Michael’s first… whatever this was…

They called it hot chocolate, but it was really just hot milk with a slab of ganache on the glass. Points for creativity, but Michael was excited and took a huge bite of the ganache up front which meant the rest of it wasn’t that chocolatey. User error.

After Schoon, it was off to Paarl to see the Spice Route. This had been recommended to us by one of Vanessa’s friends and sounded awesome. It was a winery/distillery/brewery/chocolatier/glass blowing/pizzeria/bbq/coffee shop all smooshed into one. Definitely a great way to start wine country. The wine wasn’t the best, but the space was great and we loved popping into the brewery and doing some gin tasting. Gin… not my favorite. But they also had a handful of other grain alcohols that I could definitely get behind.

Also it was fun doing a local beer tasting:

After the Spice Route, we headed to the AirBNB in Franschhoek to drop off our stuff and the car. We had struggled with a decision to hire a driver or go with Ubers and taxis. The driver was expensive, but we weren’t sure how reliable the Uber situation was. After doing some online research, we decided to go with Ubers. I’m not sure I’d call it a mistake, but we struggled finding Ubers in Franschhoek. We basically ended up using a Taxi service for 60% of the time and they sent us the same guy, Michael, every time. I’m sure he was sick of us by the end of our two days in Franschhoek.

Again, I’ll try not to bore you too much, but here are a few notes on the wineries and restaurants we hit up in Franschhoek… more for my memory than anything else.

Day 1

Holden Manz – we sat outside, the wines were very good. Nothing else to say. No pictures.

Boschendal – we had dinner here. They also do wine tastings, but we just incorporated that into our dinner. The food was good, but the best part was sitting outside over the garden and seeing sunset.

Day 2

Moreson – really nice outdoor seating, the wines were great and we bought a bunch of charcuterie there. Apparently they do a 2 day course in how to make charcuterie. Michael was super bummed that we didn’t have time to do that.

I mean – I’m pretty sure I could sell this photo to a magazine or something. Where did that random wind come from to gently blow Vanessa’s hair?

And then us looking a bit less glamorous:

Here’s Jeffrey holding some of that charcuterie… note how happy he is to have his picture taken:

GlenWood – we really enjoyed sitting outside and their white wines. Their Chardonnay was delicious and their Sauv Blanc/Semillon was also great. The tasting guy was a bit strange and spent a surprising amount of time criticizing straight Sauvignon Blancs.

Haut Espoir – they had an incredible view of elephant mountain and great artwork on their wine. Plus their 2011 Shiraz was one of Michael’s favorites. Here is a picture of the mountain and of the label. See if you can see the elephants in both:

Hint: rear to the left, head to the right.

Stony Brook – Ghost Gum Cabernet was delicious. They have a Chicago distributer. We sat outside with their two dogs and a table of Swedish people were buying and opening some of the crazy expensive stuff, so we got to have a few tastes that were a bit out of our price range.

Le Lude – Like the majority of wine producers, wineries in South Africa cannot call their sparkling wines “Champagne”. They call it MCC which stands for Methode Cap Classique. Le Lude had great MCCs, but there are two important things to point out about this stop.

1. It was only a few blocks from our AirBNB, so we walked, but once we got there, there was another half mile or mile to get to the tasting room of the main road. We weren’t expecting the additional distance and we were trying to get a tasting right before they closed. We were pretty worried we were not going to make it, which resulted in Michael sprinting to the tasting room to ensure we got in. His performance was incredible and we got our tasting.

2. Once in, they did a tasting of their Chardonnay MCC and their Pinot Noir MCC (the rose sparkling). Both were great. Then they poured us a glass of really bad Champagne. Like 7 buck stuff. It was horrible. I think their point was to show that their stuff is better than some Champagne, but the point fell flat. Maybe they could have said something about why they were giving us crap Champagne. Was it the same price range? How did it compare? No clue. It was bad and their stuff was better. It was a strange tasting.

Chef’s Warehouse at Maison – Tapas style dinner – super delicious. I think all of us are happy that there are no pictures. A lot of wine for just one day…

Some of you may have heard that Cape Town has some major water issues… as in… they’re out of it.

After four years of drought, the water supply for the city has almost run out. The reservoir is almost empty. So at some point, the city will have to stop supplying water to homes and businesses. What does this mean for our visit? It didn’t affect us too much to be honest. At our first AirBNB, the owner asked that we take showers that were 90 seconds or shorter. Not a problem! Navy shower. Turn the water on, get wet, turn the water off, soap up, rinse off. We also had a bucket to collect shower water that we could use to flush the toilet. Besides showers, one suggestion was to only flush when necessary. Brown, flush it down. Also not hard to do. In many of the restaurants and public restrooms, the faucets were turned off completely and replaced with hand sanitizer. Finally, all drinking water that we had was bottled.

What did we learn from this experience? A ton. They estimate that if you run the water when you brush your teeth, you are wasting a gallon of water. Every flush of the toilet was labeled as 9 liters of water. Now, I know that this varies from toilet to toilet, but I can tell you that the amount of water in the bowl here was much lower than the amount that we keep in the bowls (on average) in the states. The biggest surprise to me was the showers. Even a super quick, less than 90 second, shower was filling a huge bucket (perhaps 2.5 gallons) and then some. That’s a shower where we were really trying our best to conserve. Imagine a leisurely shower!

I’m sure locals were doing a lot more than we were doing, but we tried to help as much as we could. The work that locals have been doing to conserve has really helped. The date that the city was expected to run out was originally April 1st, but that has now been pushed back because of how careful people have been. They’re also working on building systems to convert salt water to fresh, but won’t have that ready in time.

This is an issue that other cities are going to start having around the world. Neither Michael nor I can remember the details of this anecdote, but we’ve heard of wealthy people buying up land specifically because it has fresh water on it in preparation for when it becomes a scarce commodity. I know we are leisurely with water in the States or most places around the world (excluding Northern California), but it’s something we should probably be worried about.

Final thought: as with most issues regarding natural resources, it’s the poor who will be affected by this in Cape Town. We had no problem buying water for all of our needs and still using our 50 liters/day for showering and such. I’m sure there are many people who are being hit very hard by this and more so in the future.

On that sad note.. on to wine country!

February 26-27

Some of you have heard stories about our issues with Table Mountain the last time we were in South Africa. The hike was not ideal. We didn’t plan for it properly and as such, it was horrible. No water, no sunscreen and we weren’t feeling well going into the trip. We got to the top, but it was awful.

This time around, Mike was calling this hike my redemption hike. So let’s see how we did…

Not bad to be honest. It was still really hard, but we were more prepared. And as such, we got to actually enjoy the views when we got to the top.

And then this picture of us making fun of other tourists. Kids at home… it’s not nice to make fun of other people, but if you’re going to, make sure just make sure they are in the dark about it.

And one picture to show how far we’d climbed… we started at the base of the cable car:

We also had some decent beach time in Camps Bay, where we were staying. This is me being paparazzi while Michael and Vanessa walked out to the water:

Creepy, but nice shots, right?

And we had a delicious dinner at Victoria & Alfred Waterfront with our buddy from Antartica, Keith, and his girlfriend, Leah.

It was a super fun surprise that they were in time at the same time (read: we forgot he said he was going to be here at this time and we changed our dates to coincide with his). Leah, a medical student who was volunteering in Africa, may not have been that impressed with our antics, but she put on a good face for us.

Here’s Jeff and Vanessa with the only rhinos they are going to see on this trip:

The next day was another relaxing day with beach, beers, good food and massages for me and Vanessa. Great way to end our time in Camps Bay before heading to wine country.