Out of Africa

Apologies to those who've been trying to get in touch with us - Don and I have just returned from a 2-week trip to South Africa. The first week was our annual Africa Harvest board meeting, held in Johannesburg. As always, this was a fantastic meeting with lots of new ideas about how to move the organization forward and I can't begin to say how personally satisfying it is to work on something that you feel is making a difference in such important ways!

Last years meeting took me to Africa for the first time, and I spent only one extra day seeing just a bit of what Kenya has to offer. When I left I promised myself that next time I'd plan to spend more time - so this year, Don came out to join me and we took an extra week after the board meeting to spend vacationing. We first flew to Cape Town, which is a very lovely city and which preserves some of the earliest colonial history of South Africa. The city hugs the center of a beautiful, sweeping bay just to the north of the Cape of Good Hope. This picture actually shows the Atlantic coastline, and a ridge of mountains called 'The 12 Apostles'. Rising above the bay is a dramatic, broad high mesa called Table Mountain. We took a cable car to the top which affords stunning views of the city and the Cape itself. Here's a picture of Don on the top of Table Mountain.

Next day we went off to wine country. South Africa is most known for its red wines, mainly Cabernet and Shiraz, but we also found unique wines being made from more typically Rhone-type grapes, such as Mourvedre, Grenache and Viognier. Our first visit was to Franschoek, 'the Healdsburg of South Africa', as Don called it. Beautiful little town, nestled in among vineyards turning yellow in the fall with craggy peaks rising above. They've been making wine in these valleys since the 1600's. We didn't spend a lot of time tasting, but did visit a very special winery, Solms-Delta, which in addition to great wine also has an excellent small archaeological museum which shows the history of the area going all the way back to Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes. Solms-Delta has a unique structure, with three farms one of which is held in trust for the benefit of the local people who were 'historically disadvantaged' by the colonization by whites. We limited ourselves to one bottle - the 2004 Hiervandaan, a blend of Shiraz, Mourvedre, Grenache, Carignan and Viognier.

Returned to Cape Town via Stellenbosch, where we stopped for lunch at Speir Wine Farm, bought a couple more bottles and then back to the city. Next morning, on to Mpumalanga for an adventure in 'the bush'!