Ahhh, Cape Town!

We drove to Cape Town on Sunday, another beautiful day in South Africa. Our hotel was in Tyger Valley (wherever that is) with an outstanding view of Table Mountain and the lights of the city. After driving all day, we were all quite eager for gins and tonic with the view! Wine with dinner, oh yes.

We LOVE South African wines — if only they exported more of them to the US; if anyone has looked lately, you see that there is very little choice, at least in New Mexico. Noekie has decided I should become a wine importer, but I think I’ll leave that to someone else and will just keep hoping they will do it soon. Does anyone need a new career? Such good wine, always — I think there is no bad wine bottled in SA.

While poor Noekie had to work, the three of us took the hotel shuttle to the waterfront. Our shuttle driver was quite lovely and, of course, we were chuffed (as Marita says) to hear his political views that matched ours so well. The Western Cape, of which Dana Bay and Cape Town are a part, is DA country, not ANC. The only province that is, and also the only province that is really working. Cape Town looks very, very prosperous — hard to see any of the economic woes facing much of the country. We had a great time, I was on the lookout for ras al-harout and harissa for a chicken dish I wanted to cook for everyone. I found something approximating ras al-harout, but found only one harissa that didn’t look quite as lethal as licking the hinges of hell, but then I forgot to go back and buy it. With hot spices everywhere in Cape cuisine, no one had ever heard of harissa #1. Will go back when we have our week vacation in CT in June.

In Francehoek (I’m pretty sure that’s misspelled, there should be an s somewhere, but I can’t figure out where and nobody is here at the moment to ask — I even looked on the 9 bottles of wine we have and not a one with address from that misspelled place! THAT’S FRANSCHHOEK, NO E, THE S IN ITS PROPER PLACE AND 2 Hs. After all that looking at wine bottles the paper Laird picked up there was right across the table from me. Duh.), we looked for the Bacon Bar, a place we loved two years ago, but, alas, out of business. Sorry, Sandy, I was going to buy you something piggy. It’s where I got your wire pig. We had lunch there, pretty lackluster I thought. I ordered shrimp and avocado salad, never dreaming I’d have to pull the heads off and shell the shrimp and the avocado came like guacamole, except without the interest. Mashed up avocado on greens with too much dressing is not my idea of good. Nor were the shrimp, which had been cooked so much I couldn’t get all the shell off and kept having to spit out pieces. Not lekker! as we say in Africaans.

Coming back, Noekie had to pick up some talapia fingerlings for the flower farm — they want to do aquaculture as part of the farm. Laird and Marita sat with the cooler of baby fish, 106 of them, between them on the way home and they worried that the little portable pump wasn’t pumping in enough oxygen, so Laird would blow into the hose every 10 minutes or so to make sure they were oxygenated. I wondered how anyone knows how much oxygen 106 talapia fingerlings need and whether they were gooing to get an oxygen high from two oxygen sources. Once when we stopped to buy wine, very cheaply, Noekie was moving the car to find shade and the ice chest turned over to a wet result — but at least she didn’t have to pick up fish and fling them back in. After all that, we got home about 7ish last night and this morning Norman called to say there had been only one fish casualty. Hooray, Laird and his fishy CPR!

Noekie and Marita are off again today, traveling to Bloemfontein — about an 8-hour trip, which I am so thankful I don’t have to do. They’ll be back on Friday. Laird is just coming back from his walk, so I have to give back his computer.