Author: globegazers

Monthly Recap: Month 2

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**Special Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad (Peggy and Wayne) Edition!

We have now been on the road for 2 months! The trip has started to feel more and more real and less like a summer vacation. School has recently started and that really made a difference in how the trip feels for Della. It is hard to believe we are going to be gone for so long. At the same time, we are already 2 months in! We plan to do a recap every month to summarize and then reflect.

Countries visited: 5 (South Africa, Germany (though only for an 8 hour layover), Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia)

Beds Slept In: 11

UNESCO Heritage Sights Visited: 10 (Fossil Hominid Sights of South Africa, Robben Island, Cape Floral Region, Kutna Hora, Historic Center of Prague, Historic Center of Cesky Krumlov, Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc, Krakow’s Historic Center, Wieliczka Salt Mine, Auschwitz Birkenau) Total on RTW: 15

We traveled by 3 planes (though they were 3 legs of the same trip from Cape Town to Prague)

We traveled by 5 trains (one of them was an overnight train!)

We traveled by 5 long distance buses.

Top Moments:

~ Our first top moment came at the very beginning of the month! During our time in Cape Town, we took a tour to the Cape Peninsula. It was a wonderful day with beautiful weather and amazing scenery. First we drove to Cape Point which was gorgeous. From then came our top moment: we took an approx 45 min hike from Cape Point to the Cape of Good Hope. Check out some pictures and I’m sure you will see why!

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~We were so fortunate to have Eric’s parents join us for our time in Prague. They met us at the airport as they flew in from the US and we came from Munich. A top moment was definitely when we successfully connected!

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~ Prague is an amazingly beautiful city. On our second day there we made our way to the Prague Castle. On the way, Eric led us to an gorgeous overlook near the Strahov monastery. Our top moment was looking out on the beauty of our first European city.

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~ We spent 2 nights in the town of Cesky Krumlov. What a wonderful place! We arrived in the late afternoon and were happy to find that our Airbnb was just as close to the old town center as described. We immediately went out exploring. Our top moment was enjoying this beautiful city at dusk. There were not nearly the amount of tourists that we had encountered in Prague, people were a bit friendlier, and the old town was magical. We climbed into the castle and descended the stairs as the city fell into darkness. It was beautiful.

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Runners up for Top Moments:

~ Our hike to the top of Table Mountain was fantastic. It almost made the cut for top moments especially because of our relief about the weather. Our last full day in Cape Town dawned cloudy and dreary. We decided to go ahead with our planned climb anyway. As we drove up to the base of the hiking trail we rose above the clouds!! We were then fortunate to have a beautiful day! Plus, the heavy clouds below us made for some amazing views!

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Morning gloom…

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Base of the hike- above the clouds and the sun is shining!

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~ We arrived in Krakov without knowing quite what to expect. This Polish city does not have the reputation of Prague or Budapest, but it definitely delivered. We arrived the first evening and explored the incredibly beautiful, clean, and quaint old town. Ate in a delicious, friendly milk bar, and revelled in the less touristy atmosphere.

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~ We left bustling Prague for the great city of Olomouc. Here we found a bit of peace and quiet in another lovely Czech town. We explored the city, enjoying the pleasant and uncrowded town square. Such a relief from the craziness of Prague.

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UNESCO listed Plague Column

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Communist inspired astrological clock

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~ After not having a really great, community oriented hostel experience since the Amber Tree in Cape Town, we were so excited to find a good time at the Ginger Monkey Hostel in Zdiar, Slovakia. There was a fantastic onsie party and a pizza eating contest to give you an idea 😉

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Items Missing, Broken, Discarded, or Added:

Nothing missing, broken, or discarded!

Added: 1. Eric’s new watch and 2. Eric’s new camera (Thanks to Donna!)

Packing Update:

We have not made any changes to our bag contents except for one small thing. We sent home our pair of binoculars with Eric’s parents. We are starting to wonder if we are ever going to use the summer weather clothing that we brought. Europe has been quite cold and we haven’t even worn our shorts, tank tops, or swim suits.

Books Read: (Have you read any of these??)

Della has read The Stand by Stephan King and Starfish by Peter Watts
Eric had read The Covenant by James Michener, Poland by James Michener, Everything is Going to be Great by Rachel Shukert, The Bridge at Andau by James Michener, Final Epidemic by Earl Merkel
Eric and Della have BOTH read The Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgens

Our reading has slowed down considerably from last month (at least Della’s has…). I guess that is what happens when you suddenly have access to the internet again…

Make sure to catch up on all our monthly recaps: Monthly Recap 1

Small Comforts: Family

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There are a few small comforts that we run into now and then that really make us feel better while traveling…

OK, so I actually think this counts as a large comfort. After hours of traveling, more than a month in a new continent, it is an amazing feeling to get off a plane in a foreign city and find your family there waiting for you!

We were so fortunate that Eric’s parents were able to take a holiday and meet us in Prague for 10 days. Because of our long layover in Munich, they actually arrived before we did and were waiting for us at baggage claim! How wonderful!

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Cape Town to Prague via Munich

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We were quite excited when we bought our $200 tickets to Europe from Cape Town. Probably the best part was the opportunity to spend a long layover in Munich. Eric had found an excellent guide provided by the Munich airport about what to do during our 8 hours there.

We left Cape Town at approximately 2pm and flew to Jo’burg. We spent a lazy 5 hour layover there and left about 9pm. We mostly enjoyed our flight on South African airlines- they provided free wine with dinner. Of course we didn’t sleep well… And arrived in Munich, quite tired at 7:30am. After slogging through immigration we headed out to take the local bus to Freising where we visited Weihenstephan Brewery, the oldest still functioning brewery in the world! We took the bus to Freising city center, but to get to the brewery itself, we could either have taken another bus, taxi, or walk. We chose to walk and ended up finding out way to a nice walking path along a canal and through the forest. We thought it was quite scenic and helped to keep us out of the icky drizzle.

We arrived shortly before they opened their restaurant, the Braustuberl, at 10 am. Once inside, we ordered a tasting tray each, and later a dark wheat for Della and a Vitus for Eric. We also enjoyed some food. We were annoyed because they charged us for the pretzels they put out on the table! Beware of not free food!

We reversed course and made it back to the airport in plenty of time for our short flight to Prague where we meet some special guests to our travels!

 

Connections: New Friends at the Amber Tree

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Traveling is a wonderful way to meet people! Unfortunately, often those connections are strong but only fleeting. Connections is our tag to recognize and remember some of the wonderful people we meet.

We truly enjoyed the Amber Tree Lodge in Cape Town. It had great common areas and a good group of travelers. We met many wonderful people from all over the world. We especially enjoyed chatting with people late into the evening: a new friend from Argentina, practicing his English, another from Chicago, a fellow teacher (so great to get in some good teacher talk), and more from the UK, dentists in training. Wine was consumed and a great time was had by all!

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Cape Town

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After our self-drive safari, we traveled via train to Cape Town. We thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful city. We had a week there, but we wished that we could have spent more time!

Where We Stayed

Scalabrini Centre – The first four nights we stayed in the Scalabrini Centre which was right in the City Bowl of Cape Town. We chose it initially because it was quite close to the train station and we knew it was within walking distance to many of the sites. We enjoyed the hostel so much that we booked past our initial two nights. It was very clean and cute. The other great thing is that the Scalabrini Centre serves as a refugee service center in Cape Town and also has English classes. We felt good knowing that some of our money was going to support a good cause. We were trying to save money after our expensive self-drive safari, so we chose to stay in the dorm. This turned out to be a good choice. We shared the 6-bed dorm with 1 other person the first night and then had it to ourselves after that. The one downside was that not a lot of other people were there, so we weren’t able to make many connections. 

Amber Tree Lodge – For the rest of our week, we decided to move to a little bit more touristy area, closer to Long Street and to Table Mountain. We loved the Amber Tree. We stayed in the dorm and were slightly disappointed just because there was ALWAYS someone sleeping in the dorm which made every day living slightly difficult. However, there was a fabulous common area and we really enjoyed meeting and making friends with many of the other travelers. 

What We Did

District 6 Museum

District 6 was a neighborhood in Cape Town that was made up of mostly colored (an official designation of race during apartheid) people. During apartheid, the government decided that this area, because it was quite close to the city center should instead be designated a white area. Tens of thousands of people were forcibly removed from District 6 and much of the area was razed. There is now a museum to commemorate the neighborhood. We found it interesting – almost a scrapbook dedicated to what was- lots of local stories and remembrances.

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Castle of Good Hope

The Castle of Good Hope was the first permanent European settlement in South Africa. It was built by the Dutch East India Company in the 1660s. It is quite beautiful, yellow walls and a star shape. Entrance includes a free tour which we quite enjoyed. We also were fortunate to see the “Key Ceremony” at noon.

Robben Island

We took a trip out to Robben Island to see where Nelson Mandela (and many others) were incarcerated.

Traveling down the Cape Peninsula

We choose to take a tour with the Baz Bus one day to get us all the way down the Cape Peninsula. While a bit expensive, we thoroughly enjoyed the tour and it hit many places we were interested in seeing. The first stop was Hout Bay which was quite beautiful. We then continued over Chapman’s Peak Drive which was a marvel of engineering and gorgeous. We stopped at Simon’s Town to visit the African Penguins at Boulders Beach. We rode bikes in the Cape Point section of Table Mountain National Park. The unique flora and fauna here have helped to label it a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Then we visited both Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope (the most southwestern point in Africa). We had a fantastic tour guide who made sure we were never bored and we learned a lot.

Bo-Kaap

Bo-Kaap is neighborhood in Cape Town that was essentially a township know as the Cape Malay Quarter. It was populated by slaves initially. Today it is a beautiful neighborhood where you can find Cape Malay food and amazing colorful buildings. It is also the heart of Islam in Cape Town. We enjoyed lunch here and then visited the Bo-Kaap Museum. It was a small museum but we quite enjoyed meeting and chatting with the man who worked there about Cape Town, as well as American history.

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Cape Town City Sightseeing Tour

This is one of those bright red double decker bus tours that we also did in Joburg. We really enjoyed our tour there so we decided to try it in Cape Town as well. Cape Town has many more options and different lines to choose from. We chose the Blue Line which we knew would take us into wine country south of Cape Town.

Our first top was the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. This garden was huge and amazingly beautiful. Della really enjoyed the section where they asked to you to touch and smell different plants. We also liked the garden which highlighted endangered and extinct plants, the protea garden, and the new tree canopy walkway. The curse of the city sightseeing tours is that you have to stick to a schedule if you want to visit more than one place in  day. We could have spent MUCH more time in the gardens than we did. It is definitely worth a whole day.

The second stop for us was the Groot Constantia Wine Estate. This is the oldest wine estate in South Africa. It was started in the late 1600s by members of the Dutch East India Company. It took awhile but it then began to compete with all the fine wines in Europe and has continued to make excellent wine since then. We took the cellar tour and participated in a delicious wine tasting. We then wandered the vineyard and explored the historical buildings.

Climb Table Mountain 

No trip to Cape Town is complete without a trip to the top of Table Mountain. There are two ways to get up- the cable car or hiking. We knew we wanted to take on the challenge and hike it! There are several routes up, but we decided on the most popular called Platteklip Gorge. We were very disappointed when we woke up on our last full day in Cape Town… The weather forecast had been for beautiful sunny weather, but instead a layer of mist was everywhere. This was the view of Table Mountain at first.

Table Mountain should be there.

Table Mountain should be there.

We were angry with ourselves with leaving it for the last day, but we decided to do it anyway. We were thrilled when we arrived at the base of the Gorge (via taxi) to see that we had risen above the mist. The hike was long and difficult- many stairs which felt like we were going straight up (though this is the least strenuous way route up the mountain). There were times where we felt like the clouds were following us. But we made it up and then decided to take a side hike on the top to Maclear’s Beacon which is the tallest point on the mountain. We took a slightly different route back and were amazed by how close the path came to the edge of the cliff. There had been signs warning that this route could be dangerous in wet or windy weather and we could definitely see why. With our beautiful day though, it was a good choice. We then made our way to the other side end of the mountain to the cable car station. We decided to take the cable car down and enjoyed the descent back into the clouds.

Where We Ate

We ate in many different places, but we narrowed it down to only two to recommend.

Biesmiellah – This restaurant is located in Bo-Kaap and has been serving Cape Malay food for many years. It is an institution of Bo-Kaap, even mentioned in the museum. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal of Bobotie and Tomato Breedie.

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Eastern Food Bazaar – There were many restaurants similar to this in Cape Town. But we really thought it was fun. It is a long string of counters with different kinds of food, similar to a food court. You would pick what you want and go to a central counter to pay and then go back to the counter with your food. We had huge portions of delicious food for very reasonable prices.

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All this for only $8!

Bushlore Review

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Probably the biggest decision we had to make for our self-drive safari was which company to rent our truck from. The truck would be our transportation and accommodation for 25 days so we definitely wanted something reliable. We ended up going with Bushlore based on their price point and a few reviews we were able to find. Hopefully our review will help anyone trying to make a similar decision in the future!

Truck
The truck itself was a Toyota Hilux (like seemingly every other truck we saw out there). We think it was relatively new – only 27000 km (about 16000 miles) on the odometer when we picked it up. The tires were new as well.

We didn’t have any complaints at all about the truck over the course of the trip. It performed quite well and didn’t have any issues that required maintenance.

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Camping Setup
The bed of the truck was setup with all the supplies and a tent on top. This performed as advertised, with some complaints. Bushlore forgot to fill up the 40 gallon water tank so we had to figure that out on our own. Also, one morning the rope-strap combination that held down the tent travel cover just came apart. We were able to improvise a solution to get it back together using a tent pole, rope and duct tape.

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Accommodation
Bushlore provided a service that helped us pre-book our camp sites along the way. This was the part of their services that we were least impressed with. Twice along the way we showed up at a camp where they had pre-booked us and we were told they had no record of the booking. Luckily we were able to still stay, but it was frustrating to have to deal with this after having paid Bushlore to handle this for us.

We also noticed that maybe it wasn’t even necessary to have booked as much ahead of the time as Bushlore had us do. The national parks were definitely full, but other locations had plenty of empty space. So we’d recommend only booking a limited number of sites.

Final Review
It seemed like in general the issues with Bushlore stemmed from the fact that there are a large company, and we didn’t have the personal touch that we might have liked. The truck was really nice, but the service aspect was lacking, which we would have liked since we were so nervous. We’d probably say that if it’s your first time on safari, maybe look for a smaller company to give you a little more attention. But if you have experience, their equipment will definitely do a good job for you.

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Robben Island

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One thing we knew we wanted to do with our time in Cape Town was to visit Robben Island. It is an island off the coast of the city which served as a prison during the Apartheid era, and was where Nelson Mandela was held for the majority of his time behind bars.

If you would like to visit the island, you need to book your trip in advance as it is a very popular tourist attraction. We were lucky in this regard as we were able to only book one day in advance. We heard this was rare. The reason for our luck in booking was due to our unlucky weather. We knew the day would be rainy and cold, and it was possible that tours can be cancelled if the weather is too bad.

The day was, indeed, miserable weather-wise. But we were fortunate that our tour was not cancelled. You travel to the V & A Waterfront and find the Nelson Mandela museum to start the trip. It was very busy and quite crowded as they herded us into the basement, through a metal detector, and then back outside for a walk to the other side of the water where we boarded one of two boats.

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The ride out to the island was approximately 35 min. Because of our poor weather, the sea swells were quite high. It was a bit unfortunate as there were a few people who ended up getting sea sick – not us thankfully!

Once you arrive on the island, you enter a bus and are given an approximately 45 min driving tour. It was interesting to learn about the history of the island which served as a prison for both the Dutch and the English in the very early years. They would just drop off the prisoners there and leave them. It also served as a leper colony and animal quarantine. It also played a role in the defence of Cape Town during WWII and had a large military presence during that time. It also, famously, served as a holding place for mainly political prisoners during the Apartheid era here in SA.

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We were fascinated that there is still a fairly thriving settlement on Robben Island today. Many people live there full time. These people are mainly employees of the Robben Island Museum. It was interesting to hear that both ex-prisoners and ex-guards still work there today… and end up living as neighbors.

After the driving tour, you reach probably the most interesting part of the day. You get off the bus and enter the prison building itself. You are also met by another tour guide – this one will be a former political prisoner of the island. Our guide had been working for the military wing of the ANC (African National Congress) during the early eighties, trying to help smuggle weapons into South Africa from Botswana. He was captured by police, tortured, and thrown in prison in 1983. He served his 7 year sentence and was released in 1990, shortly before the prison was closed. It was very interesting to hear his story and his memories of his time in prison. Near the end of the tour, we were taken to the cell where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years.

Overall, despite the horrible weather, which prevented us from seeing what would have been excellent views of Cape Town and Table Mountain,  we really enjoyed the day. We found it a pretty moving experience.

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This picture is not actually from Robben Island. It is from the waterfront when we returned from the island to Cape Town, but it definitely gives you a feel for the weather of the day.

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