Wine and trams

Well, Crawley v Stockport was a bit of a disappointment on Monday evening, but yesterday was a good day!

Franschhoek is a lovely little town, first settled in the 17th century by the Huegenots, so lots of lovely old buildings and a distinctly French feel, with lots of fine restaurants.

Which explains why it’s one of the premier wine producing regions of the world. Because of this they have a great idea to enable people to visit the various wineries, large and small, in the region, namely The Franschhoek Wine tram system.

Basically It’s a network of hop-on hop-off old trams and tram buses which cover various routes across the area, enabling visitors to visit as many (or as few) wineries as they can manage in a day, for a single ticket. There are five different colour-coded lines to choose from. After much in-depth research on the wineries on the route we opted for the Pink route.

We started off at 09:30 and managed to take in a total of 6 excellent wineries during the day to sample their products. 

One even had a motor museum, with about 30 vintage cars, including a great Ford Capri. Takes me back over 40 years to when I had one.

It would have been seven vineyards, but one of the wineries on the itinerary, Pigcasso, is famous mostly for their resident pig, who apparently painted pictures on canvas. A sort of porcine version of Jackson Pollock. Many of these sold for quite high amounts. Unfortunately the previous week the poor animal had died (several locals were actually in mourning for him) and since I’d had egg, bacon and sausage for breakfast we felt it best to honour his memory by swerving the vineyard entirely. He was only eight. No age for a porker.🐖

A good lunch at The Rickety Bridge Winery and copious amounts of wine during the day meant for a ‘relaxing’ evening back at base.

Just time for a quick G &T at the bar round the corner though, to get my five a day.

Today is our last full day here before returning to Cape Town and the first leg of our flight back home, so a bit of shopping in the morning followed by an afternoon by the pool seemed to be the best option, plus polishing off the rest of the gin.

We have really enjoyed our time here in South Africa, and would thoroughly recommend the country to anyone. The people are warm and friendly, the countryside and coastline stunning and the place is perfectly safe. Sure there are areas where it is advisable not to wander into at night, but that’s the same worldwide. The food in the restaurants is great, but also very reasonable. We didn’t have a bad meal during the entire trip, but yet never paid more than £50 in total for a quality three course meal for two with a bottle of wine.

It’s a long journey, around 15 hours in the air in total. but well worth it. And let’s face it, sadly in modern day Britain sick people can spend longer than that waiting in hospital corridors.🙁