After sorting through about 2000 photos, we narrowed it down to 200! Please note that all the pics are indexed on our site and hosted on flickr, so comments and other flickry goodness are available for those inclined. You can also revisit our posts from the trip by clicking on the South Africa tag.

Now that the South Africa photos are up, Leandra can start working on the London photos!

Categorized by region, but in no particular order…

Somerset West
Morgenster—lovely olive oil and wine tasting (three bordeaux style red blends).
Vergelegen—the wine tasting was impersonal with a la carte pricing but the beautiful estate and gardens made up for the lack of charm.
Wellington
Diemersfontein—the most delicious chocolate and coffee pinotage! The wine tasting room closed seven minutes before we arrived, but the service staff allowed us to hang out on the patio and order a few glasses of wine and enjoy the sunshine. This was by far the best pinotage of the trip.
Hex River Valley
De Doorns Co-op—mix of wines from the local wine growers, the best was an unusual Viognier/Shiraz blend from Auction Crossing.
Constantia
Groot Constantia—huge place, very touristy, but they have some decent wines and a good port.
Buitenverwachting—we tried a sauvignon blanc from here in NY before we left and when we asked about it, the woman had no idea what I was talking about. Regardless, we really liked the dessert wine. {see update below}
Darling
Groote Post—charming place, the best wine was the Old Man’s Blend red.
Ormonde Vineyards—nice sauvignon blanc, but we decided we aren’t big fans of bush vine grapes in general.
Darling Cellars—forgettable.
Cloof—nice shiraz and pinotage but the guy was rude and that can be a dealbreaker for us. {see update #2 below}
Worcester
Nuy—good wines, a very nice dessert wine, but the woman pouring seemed to have no knowledge or interest in the wines.
Stellenbosch
Spier—not impressed with the wine, but the buffet lunch at Moyo restaurant and cheetah exhibit were great.

Update: Because the internet is an amazing place, we just received an email from a US importer for the Buitenverwachting winery in response to this post. The wine we had in NY was the ‘Beyond’ sauvignon blanc and we liked it so much, we made sure to visit the winery on our trip. Apparently, the same wine is called Buiten Blanc in South Africa; it was renamed for distribution here because of the possible trouble pronouncing Buitenverwachting in the US. She also forwarded our comments to the winery, so they are aware of the alternate name. (Thanks Molly!)

Update #2: We also received an email from Cloof asking for more information about our “rude” host, so we let him know the exact date and time we visited the winery. Frankly, I feel the guy’s attitude directly stemmed from the fact that the winery closed at 4pm and he had little interest in helping us because we walked in at 3:40pm. My dad purchased some wines (simply because they were very good), but as soon as we walked out the door, it was shut and audibly locked behind us. I hope the man who contacted us looks into this matter and am glad he wrote asking for a follow-up.

Besides the flowers in the Helderberg nature reserve we also saw a variety of birds, including the two weaver birds shown below (male and female respectively).

At the nearby Morgenster and Verglegen wine estates we did some wine and olive tasting and enjoyed the incredible gardens, which hosted the bee and beetle pictured below.

One of our favorite places in Cape Town is the World of Birds in Hout Bay. During our second visit, we spent about three hours enjoying the company of a variety of birds…

In one of the aviaries, a hadeda ibis took a liking to my shoes… he protected his find when others walked by, including a German lady who let out a hearty shriek when her toes were nibbled! Thankfully, mine were protected.

This cast of characters were among the hundreds of birds we saw—an eagle, an owl, and a stork. I’ll get the specifics later when I go through all my shots of informational signage!

I’m a big fan of sunsets, and so far, our trip has provided a number of beautiful sunsets for my photographic pleasure. Below is a shot from Kommetjie Beach Thursday night.

Earlier in the day I took a shot of the town of Hout Bay

Later that evening night I tried a long exposure shot – this is one of my first attempts, also of Hout Bay.

In the last few days we’ve visited two game parks, seen three spectacular mountain passes, and tasted wine at several different wineries in the Cape Winelands region. Leandra has probably doubled the amount of mussels she’s eaten in her lifetime, and Eric has taken ~1800 photos so far. :)

Obviously we have a tremendous amount of photos to sort through, but here are a few of our favorites from the two game parks, Buffelsfontein and Aquila.

Zebra at Buffelsfontein.

A baby rhino with her protective mother—there were two other rhino nearby as well. They were quite relaxed around the vehicles so we were able to get quite close.

Sleepy lions at Aquila—we were approximately 30 feet from these cats! There was one more closer to the vehicle that was watching us very closely…

We also saw Cape buffalo, hippos, ostrich, kudu, eland, springbok (many, many springbok), bontebok, giraffes, meerkats, and elephants, oh my!

We arrived in Cape Town after an eleven hour flight, which was preceeded by an eight hour (waaay too long) layover in London. My aunt and two cousins met us at the airport and we took the long scenic way home to drop off our luggage.

We revisted Simon’s Town for lunch with the penguins (okay, not quite) but many tourists pay to walk on the same beach the penguins frequent, and just a few yards down the birds are chilling out near a free parking lot. Sweet.

That evening we walked down to the beach with my uncle Doug. Not fifteen minutes before this he was telling us about a sea otter he’s seen only twice the entire time he’s lived here. Now, guess who appeared on the beach for us?

The sunset was also beautiful, of course.

Today we took it easy… breakfast at the mall (Eric had the most gigantic panini sandwich ever), shopping for some foodstuffs (photos below of the particularly different options), and then a drink at the pub down the street. Cody’s band even played for us this evening—a full live band in my aunt’s living room!

We have a busy couple of days coming up, but we’ll try and post again soon.

We’ve been planning our second trip to South Africa for a year, but somehow it has completely snuck up on us… Between the craziness that was August and getting house modifications finished, I can’t even wrap my head around the fact that Thanksgiving is next week!

(And I have an entire house to clean. Heh.)

(Oh, and see the photos from our first trip here.)

A few months ago, Eric set up a wiki to help us organize our activities for South Africa. We can both update the page as we discover things and keep track of the places we want to revisit as well as explore some new locations.

Here are some things that we are looking forward to:

• wine tasting—don’t get me wrong, we drank plenty of wine last time, just not in a, um, formal setting. We’ll need a set aside at least a few days for this. :)
• World of Birds—we only had about two hours here during our first visit, so I definitely want to go back, preferably with a fully charged camera battery, right Eric?
• Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens—last time we were there in March (late summer), so there should be an interesting difference in flowers. Hopefully, we’ll get to see more king proteas… we only spotted one in bloom on our last trip.
• hike up Lion’s Head—great views of Cape Town.
• whale watching in Hermanus—it will be the end of the season, so we’ll play it by ear.
• Cape of Good Hope/Cape Point—who wouldn’t want to see this view again?

I imagine we’ll also spend plenty of time on the beach, eating delicious food, rounding Chapman’s Peak, and playing with penguins. We can’t wait!