Cape Town Day 1

I'll try to keep this short!  We are having a wonderful time and seeing some really beautiful things but it doesn't come together as a story quite like the week of house-building did.  By the way, this is a late post because yesterday we were quite tired!

We said goodbye to the team and the city of Durban early in the morning on Sunday, and caught a ride to the airport with Karl, our African Exposure guide.  He was also headed to Cape Town also, but for business and not for sightseeing.  Habitat for Humanity is part of a nationwide celebration of Nelson Mandela's birthday.  They have over 600 people coming from all over the world to build 67 houses in 1 week.  Karl and Gavin will be working with some of that group.  The number 67, according to one of our tour guides today, symbolizes the number of years of his life Mandela dedicated to activism.  The goal is for everyone to spend 67 minutes doing something to benefit their community or nation on July 18th, which would be Mandela's birthday.

The 2 hour flight to Cape Town seemed short by comparison to our last day-long adventure.  We arrived around lunch time and were greeted by Kim, our guide for the next few days.  She is lovely and very knowledgeable about the area and South Africa in general.  And she is an excellent driver, which means none of us have to navigate these streets and this "backwards" way of driving.

We had lunch at a lovely historic farm called Vergelegen in Sommerset West.  It was part of one of the first settlements of the cape by the Dutch, and is now a vineyard as well.  The grounds and gardens were beautiful and lunch was delicious.

We then continued on to Stellenbosch, one of the multiple areas of winelands near Cape Town.  We drove through the historic university town with it's very unique Cape Dutch architecture. Kim explained that this is a very conservative Afrikaner town and the lectures are taught in Afrikaans instead of English. Although there is the option of buying textbooks and writing papers in English. We then had a wine tasting at Stark-Conde vineyards.  It was delicious, and you couldn't ask for a more beautiful setting. 

We drove back through beautiful winelands to Cape Town.  Our hotel is only a few blocks from the Victoria and Alfred waterfront district and the harbor, which is quite convenient. After a lovely harborside dinner we called it am early night.  We all separately attempted to watch the World Cup finals, but none of us succeeded in watching through the overtime, which went until 12:30 am or so here in our time zone.