Saturday, April 2, 2011

Wine Route, Western Cape

Well, we did the Wine Route in 2 days, mainly because I don't plan trips, I just make it happen.

The wine route is quite large, and you would have to drive around a lot. Here's a map, because I'm too lazy to write everything.



There's a lot of hooha about Stellenbosch, although it is really beautiful, there's much more to the whole wine route than you would think. Like Butterfly World in Paarl, its filled with amazing animals, not just butterflies, there are iguanas, birds, tortoises, crocodiles, and I can't remember the rest. If you do photography as a hobby, like my German friend, you'll have a blast. You'll have a blast anyway!



Then there was a few monuments we visited. The first on my list is the Afrikaanse Taal Monument. I am extremely passionate about this monument, because the people that worked there made me extremely mad. The food we ate was awesome! We had pancakes. Nice, traditional, South African pancakes. What upset me was the fact that the government is trying to brainwash the youth into thinking black people created Afrikaans. I'm not racist, I just hate liars. So, Afrikaans is actually known as the kitchen language of Europe, the poor slaves used to speak it, and some of them came to South Africa for better opportunities. Although the settlers were from France, Portugal, Holland, Spain, etc. Afrikaans still came from Europe. The brochure at the Afrikaanse Taal Monument actually say that the Afrikaans language originated in South Africa so that blacks and whites could understand each other. The minister of "let's create a new culture" must not have had history in high school, or primary school for that matter. Anyway, all my anger aside, I am glad to have been there.



The next monument on my list is the Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek. The funny thing about going there is that they charged us to go and see the damn thing, although the fences around it was as tall as my knees. Idiots. So, we paid, went in, and about 10 minutes later, the grandpa that stole our money, and probably had to go to bed at four in the afternoon, shouted at us, telling us the monument is closed. Again. Idiots. I love this monument. The detail and everything that its made of, just screams amazing! A must see. And if you go there and you can speak a foreign language, please give the old fart my regards. Oh, see if you can find Waldo. Grin.



Then, the last monument we went to go see, we found by accident. I got confused with the Huguenot Monument and a childhood memory, so, I never agree that I'm wrong and I decided that we we're going to look for it. I typed "monument" into the GPS, and we followed this ghost monument. We found the extremely small Dirkie Uys Monument in Somerset West. Its dirty, unprotected, and is in dire need of a relaunch or something. Dirkie Uys is one of the bravest little kids in our history. He died at the age of 15, against the Zulus. Someone needs to fix that place. Note the little "Hip Hop" graffiti.



Right, now to the fun stuff. Wine! We'll we didn't get as drunk as I was hoping, but we had fun, we went wine tasting at a little unknown something wine farm. They had two wines for us to taste. So, we left.



We went to the best place. Rhebokskloof Wine Estate in Paarl, we tasted wine, had lunch wile they saddled up the horses (oh, by the way, please book in advance, we didn't), went horse riding. So, the big boom in this story? The horse riding instructor's name is Michelle Mazurkiewicz. She works with horses in movies. She's worked with Samuel L. Jackson, and a few others. She worked with the horses in Racing Stripes, 300, The Ring, etc. Amazing. She had this saying when we didn't book the horse riding in advance: "horses, aren't like cars, you can't just start them and go. We need to catch them and saddle them up first." I like her.



It was good, I'll do it again...

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