winos

table mountain can be climbed in about 5 hours, or you can be hoisted up in a cable car, in about 30 minutes. the day we arrived in capetown (thursday). fairly regularly there's a cloud bank that drops over the table, and it looks like a wave crashing over a reef in slow motion. the locals call it the table-cloth. sunday was the first day that table mountain was totally clear, and the weather was great. i wanted to head up the mountain, but jonii decided she was more up for wine. we were both exhausted, so getting drunk seemed better than sweating up a storm climbing the mountain :-)

frank the maitre d' from savoy cabbage had recommended 8 vineyards that we should go to, and of them listed 4 as not to miss. we figured we'd just go hit those 4, since coffee, moving and general lolly gaggling had now brought us to 11:30am. the first place we tried to find was frank's highest rated - waterford. we got lost at a different vineyard (blaauwklippen), decided to drink their wine anyway (it sucked), then drove through dirt roads for 10 minutes to arrive at the waterford estate. we were met at the gate by a guy handing out some kind of invitation. turns out that the day we picked to arrive was the one day of the year that the waterford is closed for harvesting! some luck. but the invite we got was for a free wine and chocolate tasting. some start to our wine excursion: sucky wine and closed gates!

headed on to the delheim, which is a rambling estate with a very tuscan feel to it, and had lunch there. did not do the wine tasting because they charged for it, and we felt they should have given us a freebie since we paid for lunch, dammit! nice place, mediocre food.

we then hit warwick, which was really good and we picked up a couple of bottles; and jordan, which was just about closing but we managed to get the last couple of glasses of some damn good mixed stuff called chameleon and plunked down the card for a couple more bottles. last stop was spier. this place is more like an amusement park than a vineyard. they've got a massive buffet, a shopping arcade, pony rides, and cheetah petting. yup, cheetah petting. i convinced jonii to go do it coz how often do you get to pet a cheetah. they're pretty tame - they just hang about and don't really care that you're around them. we were told that if you run into a cheetah in the wild (which i'm sure you will) they'll just hiss at you, and run off. they're not really designed to attack larger animals, so you're pretty safe. didn't try the wine - there was a line and it felt totally like a tourist trap.

full day of wino-ing, and we returned to our plush pad at the foot of table mountain to take a siesta and await warren - who we felt needed more attention from us, whether he wanted it or not!

warren showed up with bibi, a friend of his from johannesburg, and we drove 3 blocks to Chef Pon's Thai Cuisine. teh similarity to LA, in that people drive even 3 blocks should be noted here. we wound up at asoka, son of dharma, a cool place with excellent drinks after dinner to decide on the plan of attack for the rest of the night. since it was saturday, we decided we needed to go check out the capetown nightlife. bibi wanted to go to a new place called opium.

opium is a large place mostly populated with white people, and some brown - maybe indian or arab. the dj sucked. jonii decided to accost one of the black bouncers and tell him that the dj couldn't hold a beat, and the bouncer said there's a reason why there were no black people in the place :-) he suggested a place called g-spot, which was in some convoluted place that he had to draw up a map to. about 15 minutes after he gave us directions, he came up to jonii and basically said that we probably shouldn't go there without someone that knew the place, and he offerred to go with us on thursday, his night off. seems like it was a polite way to say a group of white people with one brown person trying to get into the place might cause a bit of a ruckus! unfortunately warren was pooped, and we decided to go along with him and call it a night.