Pinotage

One thing a visitor of the Western Cape should definitely have on its to-do list is wine tasting. This is not only my personal judgement, the tasting is an activity approved and suggested by several tourist guides to South Africa. They find it essential and dedicate at least a few pages to describe what a unique experience each Capetonian winery offers and how each of them deserves attention of the thirsty visitors, both local and foreign.

Just outside the city of Cape Town, the coastal rocky landscape transforms into a land of vineyards. Rolling over the hills and valleys with only individual wine estates interrupting the grapevine lines and little historical towns like Franschoek nested between the mountains, they reach further than the eye can see.

After reading through a thick brochure representing each wine estate as absolutely necessary to visit, we picked two that we found most intriguing and most different. Both were presenting their wine collection in a very professional way, using sophisticated vocabulary (most of which we didn’t understand) and offering the wines with a selection of chocolates, cheeses and salamis. In turn, we posed questions about the grape shapes, barrel colours and estate maintenance. We swirled the wine, judged the colour, sniffed it and took a sip, discussed the aftertaste and rated it like professional wine tasters.

Wines were amazing – even though most of them were mixtures of three, four or even five different grape sorts. I was especially impressed by Pinotage – rich and smoky, with notes of tropical fruit. A real jewel among South African wines.

After we couldn’t fit any more bottles in the car trunk, we continued the journey over the mountains, back to the eastern coastline and towards the city. The main arterial towards Cape Town was constructed on a sandy beach, with the ocean almost spilling over the road. White sand dunes with tufts of lush green grass and famous fynbos, and seagulls foraging for crabs among them. However, the view offered by the opposite side was highly contrasting.

Shanty town made of plastic, metal and cardboard, a mesh of electricity wires above it and swirls of smoke rising from burning rubbish piles. People slowly moving in the shadows of the sheds and avoiding laundry lines stretched across the roads, living on a minimal income, earned only once a year by doing some kind of seasonal job. One like harvesting wine grapes...

And Pinotage suddenly got a darker tone of redness.

Breakfast with penguins, supper with porcupines and a glass of wine with seals

At the very tip of the old African continent, sheltered by the mighty Table Mountain and the rough Atlantic ocean striking its coast, lies Cape Town. The colourful city where I believe Mr Tutu got the idea of the calling his people “the rainbow nation”. There’s everything for everyone, not only for the locals but also the tourists. So I decided it would be nice to see that wonder with my own eyes.

Staying for a month in KwaZulu Natal was already quite different from my first African experience (Kenya), however Cape Town brought me straight back to Europe. With the city structure, shops, parks, markets, lifestyle and food. 
But I was told there’s more than that, I heard rumours about wild penguins, whales, great whites and seals! Knowing that, the city life was almost boring. Climbing the Table Mountain didn’t bring much excitement – the Proteas were out of bloom, the weather was horrible and the view…well it was a view of a city. Only dassies (fluffy giant-hamster looking creatures with a rat character) improved the impression. Our squad of biologists therefore decided to move on to the Cape peninsula for some close encounters with the wildlife. And we got quite close indeed!

In Simon’s Town, we had breakfast with penguins. We bought fresh buns, some cheese and fruits and drove off to Boulder’s Bay, a place that is home to a decent colony of jackass penguins. Some of them even had babies! So we enjoyed our first meal of the day a few meters from them – the day could not have started better.

The next wildlife experience happened unintentionally. We were desperately in search for a bar to be a bit social and simply hang around people – because most of us were used to living with a very restricted group of conspecifics Just before giving up finding any signs of life, two locals sent us to Polana. That was a bar with a view. But not any kind of view – the bar was only a couple of meters away from the sea shore, where fat Cape fur seals were chilling after the whole day of fishing. Waves crushing on the rocks made a fair background to the view and accompanied with few glasses of good South African wine and soft blues music, the atmosphere was simply enchanting.

Other days included visiting Cape Point Nature Reserve where we walked to the southern-most point of Western Cape (we could almost see Antarctica!), admiring stunning sunsets on the sandy beaches, driving on panoramic routes and enjoying each other’s company while hiking around Chapman’s peak.

All that was unforgettable, but what I will definitely stay in my head forever was an evening with a local family. I was lucky enough to be invited for a dinner by one of my local friends and spend an evening with the whole family. The house was positioned on the foot of the mountain with a spectacular view of the ocean, the food was delicious, we had live music and even some extra guests joined later in the evening. Dogs announced the visitors by upset barking, but the guests never came in. They were porcupines, happy with feeding on composted leftovers outside. Apparently they come around often and are regarded as an everyday sight in Capetonian backyards.

Cape Town therefore gave me the best of its off-tourist season. Wonderful company, nice memories, good times.

(though that was not the end of my travels in the south. Some of the guys had to return to work and only few of us continued, following the east coast. A topic for the next post :))

The Hilltop Gang

When I’m not on the field, I stay at the camp and do the so-called “office work”, creating endless Excel sheets of field data and watching hundreds of videos from my camera traps. If I’m lucky, most of these videos show African wildlife in action – impalas peeing, honey badgers scratching about, hyenas curiously sniffing at the camera, gnus fighting, lions passing. In the opposite case, I get waving grass. Unfortunately I can’t just skip footage of moving vegetation – every single caption has to be watched from the start to the end to make sure no impala ran into the shot at the very end of the recording. Which doesn’t seem much regarding the length of it (30s), but after the 486^th same video of pure nothing, you feel truly miserable and start questioning your role in this cruel game of science.

Despite the mentioned drawbacks of the above mentioned data analysis, you enjoy the benefits of the office work. Safety of your room – no elephants sneaking up behind your back and no bizarre, creepy sounds coming out of the bushes – allows inattentive attitude. Most of the times, it brings no bad consequences, but yesterday that was not the case because it was the day when The Hilltop gang of vervet monkeys decided to pay us a visit.

Vervet monkeys are not just regular monkeys, they are a bunch of little demons. Samango monkeys, for example, are around our camp all the time and are a nice-looking, pleasant and well behaved company, keeping their safety distance from us inhabitants and happily eating fruits of the trees. Vervets, on the other hand, think they can do whatever comes on their little minds. They won’t hesitate breaking into the kitchen, stealing a pack of sugar, ripping it open and running away with it to get totally sugar-high behind the closest evergreen bush. Also, they won’t aim strictly for the kitchen – they will rather make sure that none of the doors are hiding any treats. Which means they’ll closely inspect every single room in the camp. Even if there’s someone sitting inside, busy watching videos of waving grass.

So it happened that I suddenly noticed a little monkey-shaped creature staring at me through the open window, ready to jump in the room and trash my stuff looking for sweets. 

Yelling at it didn’t help (nor doing so in Slovenian), clapping hands and waving at it did neither and only getting as close that closing the window requires kept it outside my room. With my windows and doors shut, the monkey tried its luck elsewhere. Soon I heard a scream next door - one of the vervets fearlessly ran towards the open door, showing its teeth ferociously to the person standing there, defending its belongings. One can just guess how the assault would end up if the monkey hadn’t been chased away with a chair. That’s how rude the vervets are, no respect for personal property, no respect whatsoever.

Luckily the gang was gone by the afternoon, and we were all relieved to see the Samangos back in the trees before it got dark. Let’s just hope the vervets weren’t satisfied with the treasures that this place offers and that next time they will rather stay at the Hilltop tourist resort, where people are naïve and food is plentiful.