Part 2:
CAPE TOWNWe arrived into CPT at about 6:30PM and our driver/tour guide was waiting for us after baggage claim to take us to our hotel, the Cape Grace. This hotel is right by the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront and I cannot say enough nice things about it. The staff was so friendly and helpful and eager to please. Our check-in was smooth and while we were offered the penthouse suite for *only* $750 additional per night, we stuck with the room we had already booked which was a Superior Room with a view of Table Mountain and the marina as well as a nice sized balcony.
Our agent had booked the hotel’s complimentary chauffeur service to take us to dinner so after we settled in we were on our way to Avron’s Place in Sea Point. The chauffeur was scheduled to pick us up as well an hour and a half later. The hotel offers this complimentary chauffeur service to anywhere within 10km and they told us if we tried to book a chauffeur and one wasn’t available they would call us a taxi at no charge.
The place was a little busier than we expected since the neighborhood seemed so quiet, but after just a few minutes we were seated. While the food was decent it wasn’t especially memorable and I personally found my steak sandwich a little too tough to eat while I very much enjoyed the spring roll appetizers.
Some of the menu:
Steak Sandwich:
This Beef Espatada seemed to be their most popular item since every table had at least one order of it. While I didn’t taste it my husband said it was quite good but also a little tough:
Here is where we started realizing how far the US dollar will get you in South Africa. Our entire meal which consisted of a few appetizers, a soup, a glass of wine, a smoothie, several sodas and 2 mains came to $42. We added a tip of about $7.50 and the waiter couldn’t stop thanking us. We asked the chauffeur later on what the customary gratuity in a restaurant is there and he said it’s just 10%.
We headed back to the hotel after our meal and crashed before our only day of touring in Cape Town.
We woke at 9AM on Friday and went down to the hotel’s restaurant to have our kosher breakfast. Our agent had arranged for food to be delivered from a local place called Goldie’s Diner. At the time of booking I was given a full menu of choices and was able to select what I would want for each meal. I love that these meals were served on china (albeit disposable china) and with real cutlery, and not in an airplane meal style aluminum/plastic container with plastic cutlery. Everything was double wrapped with strict instructions to the hotel on how and when to warm up each meal and they were so helpful and on the ball about it.
Breakfast consisted of a cold portion: muffin, juice, croissant with cream cheese and lox, some cut up fruit and a yogurt:
As well as a hot portion:
Eggs, tomato, potato latke (the best part!) and sautéed mushroom and onion:
Now that we’d eaten it was time to start our day in Cape Town. Cape Town has been suffering from a drought for a while and although this was their rainy season we were told that it hadn’t rained once for the last 3 weeks which of course meant it rained on that day. Our morning started out dreary:
Saunders Rock Beach:
We visited the South African Jewish Museum which we found quite interesting:
They also have a very nice little kosher café in the museum
A pizza, fries, salad and sandwich plus several drinks came to about $25 after tip!
The cable cars up Table Mountain were closed all morning due to high winds and extreme cold at the top, but since the weather started clearing up at this point we decided to go to the cable station to see if they were operating (even though their website still said they weren’t).
Unfortunately their last cable car goes up at 5PM and they didn’t reopen at all that day so we were not able to get to the top of Table Mountain. But here are some pictures from the cable car station:
I believe the mountain in the background is the Lion’s Head:
A magnificent view of Cape Town:
After that we did some driving around the city. We went to the Bo-Kaap area as well as the small Bo-Kaap museum for a quick look around:
We did a quick walk around the V&A Waterfront to buy some souvenirs then headed back to our hotel for Shabbos.
We found it quite amusing when we walked back into our hotel room and found the “Shabbos” candles my agent had requested from the hotel set up in our room:
There was glorious weather there on Shabbos and being that the Cape Grace is by the V&A Waterfront we spent most of the afternoon just wandering around there. They have a section called the Watershed, sort of like a flea market where local vendors can sell their things and it brought hipster Williamsburg to mind. From jewelry to clothing to art, they had it all and the fact that we couldn’t buy any of it was very disappointing (they closed at 6PM while Shabbos was over closer to 8PM). The rest of the Waterfront had many restaurants, souvenir shops, a Ferris Wheel, a very large mall, boat rentals and so many more things.
Cape Town has so much to offer and so much to see, we definitely could have used at least 2 more days there since we didn’t get to cover much due to the weather and Shabbos. Will definitely be back.
We had a 9AM flight Sunday morning from CPT to JNB and so we turned in early to be ready for our 6AM wakeup call. Our breakfast was wrapped and ready to go (cold portion only) and we took it with us when we left to the airport.
Our agent had booked us on a BA flight in business since it wasn’t too much more than coach (coach was about $180 per person and business was about $310) and I needed the baggage allowance (2 bags, 50 lbs. each per person). This gave us access to BA’s Slow lounge in CPT and while I wasn’t expecting much I was pleasantly surprised. I forgot to get any pics but they had a full bar, a very large breakfast spread, many couches, free wifi and a punny bathroom sign with a view of the tarmac:
I paid another ~$7 each to assign us the exit row in business class which was the first row.
The “business” class here was just all the middle seats being empty, although they did serve a meal. (Had ordered kosher but slept through meal service).
The view of Cape Town after we took off was incredible:
We had a FedAir flight booked at 1PM to Madikwe Game Reserve and a FedAir rep was there to meet us after baggage claim and then had a shuttle van take us to the FedAir Lounge. Since the planes flown to the game reserves are so small they do not allow any hard luggage and their guidelines state only duffel bags that are soft on all sides will be allowed -although several people did have wheeled duffel bags with hard bottoms that they didn’t raise an issue over. They have a storage facility in their lounge and as long as you have a return flight booked with them to Johannesburg they will store any luggage you don’t take to the reserves free of charge. Knowing this, before our Sunday morning flight we had re-packed all of our things we would need for safari into these duffels that I had bought on Amazon: (thanks
@moish )
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003KR1K40/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and left our hard suitcases in storage.
The Lounge:
Being that all passengers were present and accounted for we boarded early, at about 12:40 and were ready for take-off by 12:45. I will preface this by saying I do not NOT have a fear of flying (except in F on EK
) and was not thrilled to be flying in this tiny 8-seater flying bus.
Snack bar on the plane:
The flight was very very bumpy, and I hated every one of the 60 minutes we were in the air. I sort of felt like I was on a roller coaster without the safety straps and couldn't wait to land.
Part 3 coming up:
Etali Lodge in Madikwe
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Topic: Dvol's South Africa / Dubai TR (Read 13738 times)