We loaded up our small car and with one backpack in the boot and one on the back seat headed for Stellenbosch. There had been a wine festival in the area over the weekend so the place was pretty quiet and wintry looking with its bare vines and leafless trees. John showed me the places that he had visited with the Drews.
Along the highway towards the airport was a huge area of makeshift houses which they call townships. The box houses were made of whatever could be scavenged, steel drums beaten flat, logs, wooden pallets, and all covered with black polythene to keep as much of the weather out as they could. Above the houses was a tangle of black electric cables that are hooked into the national grid to supply electricity. Where ever there is a space there is a clothes line to hang the family wash. Some townships cover a huge area while other are quite compact.
Passed some wheat fields near Stellenbosch and stopped in the city and visited the tourist office. We got a map of a walking tour of the old historic buildings around the city centre and went inside those that we could. We found the inside of the 'H' shaped houses interesting having been built in the 1680s. Protestantism was banned in France so 277 Huguenots fled by ship to the Cape of Good Hope and settled in the Stellenbosch Valley.
We drove onto Franschhoek and checked into a lovely guesthouse near the town centre. The owners were very chatty and told us how their daughter, in her 40s, was going to ride a horse across Mongolia for 10 days as part of the world's longest horse ride event.
They told us that the town was safe and that we could walk any where and not have to worry about security as we had to in Cape Town. We were able to find a restaurant in town with a big screen to watch Netherlands and Uruguay play.
Hides drying outside a tannery.While the guesthouse was clean and had everything we needed it lacked heating and we have found it very cold in the uninsulated solid brick and plaster houses. As electricity is very expensive we have also found it difficult to read with the single low watt eco bulb that hangs in the middle of the room.
We visited the Huguenot Museum in the town and read about what life was like for the early settlers to Franschhoek as well as about the customs of the indigenous people.
Interestingly there are no fluoro-vested car guards in Franschhoek, and there are signs everywhere telling visitors not to give money to beggars and not to encourage begging in the town.
There was not much to do in town but we went to a restaurant owned by a Greek man and met a lot of locals. A couple of guys were engineers for a spring water plant, another man ran a tour company, and one was with the corrections department and head of the SWAT team. The man who was a farmer had to rush off and move his men on his farm. We found that a strange thing to do as we would rush off to move the animals!
We were able to sit with some of the locals and watch Spain beat Germany.
Repairing the Dutch Reform Church roof with reeds.
