Plettenburg Bay and Franschoek, South Africa

 We left Gondwana Game Reserve and drove another few hours on  "the garden route" through beautiful rolling farmland to the beach town of Plettenburg Bay. It was lovely, and felt more like California than Africa. It was clean and modern, with great restaurants.  Our  accommodation was a lovely small Bed and Breakfast with seven rooms overlooking the ocean.

The long sandy beach at Plettenburg Bay.

After two nights at Plettenburg Bay, we drove 4 hours back to the charming town of Franschoek where we have visited before. It is about an hour and a half east from Cape Town in a beautiful small valley surrounded by steep mountain peaks on all sides. It is known for it's vineyards and excellent award winning wines. The town is spotlessly clean, and most buildings are painted white. It has been settled since the 1600's when the Huguenot Protestants left France due to religious persecution. They began farming and growing grapes. On our last visit we saw a copy of a letter at one of the estates from Napoleon praising one of the wine producers for their excellent red wine! 

Ray described it as feeling like the Napa Valley meets Switzerland. It is much more affluent than most places we have visited in Africa, but unfortunately most of the black people we saw were working in the shops and restaurants, rather than being served as patrons.

As beautiful as it is, the infrastructure problems of  South Africa have also reached here, since the electricity is very unreliable. It goes out several times a day, impacting traffic lights, businesses and homes. The locals call it "load shedding", but basically there is not enough power to go around. This appears to be related to poor maintenance of existing power plants, as well as increased demand. Many places now have expensive backup electrical generators, but these don' help with the interruption to internet services. Shops have trouble processing payments, and internet service is very sporadic.

There are many vineyards, and wine has been produced here since the 1700's. The town is picture postcard quaint, and has loads of shops, great restaurants, and art galleries. Many are in Dutch colonial buildings that have been beautifully preserved.

The "wine tram" in front of one of the beautiful old Dutch style buildings on the main street in Franshoek. The wine tram has several different routes to visit many of the tasting rooms on the various wine estates.

We had a great dinner in this little French restaurant.

We stayed on a vineyard property that is owned by a British Lord who visits a few times a year. The manager Alan was incredibly helpful, and made dinner reservations for us every night at excellent restaurants.

The back eating area at the estate.

The Dutch style church on main street in Franshoek, built in 1845.

The view of the vineyards from the back of the estate where we are staying, 5 minutes from town.

The view from the front yard of the estate. The building and pond across the street belong to another vineyard.

We are now back in Cape Town, and board the ship again tomorrow to start the last leg of our cruise which will take 64 days to reach Tokyo on March 23.  We will backtrack to a few destinations in Africa and India before heading towards Southeast Asia.