The great thing about our South Africa Adventure is it is three trips in one. One part is the wonderful city of Cape Town. We stay in what I think is the best small hotel in the city, the Cape Heritage, and have time to explore both downtown and the new waterfront area. We also hike up Table Mountain, giving us incredible 360 degree views of the area, and visit the Cape Peninsula, where we hike, watch a penguin colony, and visit a winery.
We then move to the small university town of Stellenbosch, where we stay at a fantastic hotel right in the middle of town. Stellenbosch is full of students but also gets its share of tourists and so has the restaurants, pubs, and shops to serve both groups. Stellenbosch is also capital of the South Africa wine industry and we explore the region on foot with three fantastic hikes through vineyards.
We then fly to the eastern part of the country to our small lodge at the private Thornybush game reserve, where we spend three days doing game drives and bush walks.
I just returned from South Africa yesterday and it is our experience in Thornybush I most want to relate. This was my second safari experience and I was not sure it would match the incredible success of the first one. It surpassed that trip.
In fact, it is hard to relate in words or pictures exactly how amazing a safari can be. Said Eddie Lee, a well-traveled Zephyr alumnus who was on his 11th trip last week, “This was the most amazing experience of my life. Everyone who can afford to do so should take a safari before they die.”
Let me just list the animals we saw on our final morning game drive, when our group chose to wake up at the early hour of 4:00 AM when the bush is active:
- Four lionesses playing in a dried out stream bed.
- A male lion who did his morning roar while standing not 10 feet from our vehicle.
- A jaguar breakfasting on her catch while in a tree above us.
- A giraffe that got spooked by our group and ran off, quickly covering ground with her 15-foot strides.
- A cheetah mother and her three pups, stalking through the bush as she attempted to safely move them from one den to another.
It was absolutely amazing. Yes, our South Africa Adventure is a Wine Adventure and we do hike, visit vineyards, and taste wines in the wine country. But South Africa offers so much more and we do it all on our nine-day trip. We can only take 16 on this trip so sign up now for next October’s trip.
(The photos are of three separate hikes: Table Mountain, the Stellenbosch-area vineyards, and Thornybush reserve.)