Our last day in Cape Town and we have filled it with an all day wine country tour to two of the most renowned towns in the region:  Stellenbosch and Franschhoek.  We’re on a grey line tour, which meets at the waterfront in front of the aquarium, which is where the HoHo buses are located. The tour includes a stop at a winery in Stellenbosch, a complimentary glass of champagne, a chocolate pairing, lunch on your own then a cheese pairing at a winery in Franschhoek which sounds perfect to us.  We walk over to the meeting point and realize that it is actually HoHo bus people who are running this tour and we will be on a double decker bus (duh!  We never connected the grey line tour with HoHo, which was our bad).  When we check in though, the girl who takes our tickets says to stand in the line (that is already forming) for the wine tram tour and the bus will take us to the tram where we can take the yellow or the blue line.  Huh?  That’s not what we signed up for, so we’re a little concerned here. 

As we are standing there, though, another guide is giving us an overview of the day, and it is what we booked, so our momentary panic is gone, but we have a little trepidation with a huge tour like this.  Oh well – we’re here, we’ll make it work.

The bus arrives and we all pile on and our guides give us the run down – essentially its exactly what was in the description, although there is a stop at some beach for a picture of Table Mountain across the bay (when one of the passengers asks the guide why we stop there he says it’s basically to waste time so we get to the winery at the appointed time – gotta love honesty!).  It is a beautiful day, and the view to Table Mountain is fantastic so while Ed stays on the bus, I hop off to get a couple of shots with the mountain in the background, then hop back on for our journey to Stellenbosch.

As it turns out, the tour goes off so smoothly, you’d never know you were with 51 other people!  Everyone is nice and polite, they don’t jostle or hassle. When Rico (our guide) tells us to be somewhere, everyone shows up.  It seriously couldn’t be smoother.  We visit Backsberg, have a quick tour of their cellars and operations, then sit at a huge long table for the wine tasting, which is quite nice along with the chocolates.  The wine is good enough to buy a bottle to take aboard Quest, so that will tell you something!

Everyone is back on the bus at the appointed time, and we head off to Franschhoek, the little town that is supposed to be the culinary and wine capital of the region.  Here we’ll have 2 hours of free time for lunch and shopping. We’ve done some research on the restaurants and have a couple picked out, but Rico tells us that with our tickets, we get a free wine or beer tasting at Bovine, a local restaurant.  If we want to partake, we can follow him there.  No obligation to purchase a meal, but we do get the tasting free.  Well, how can we say no to that?  And we might as well just stay there to eat too!

Which is what we do!  It’s a lovely little restaurant which features predominately beef (no, you don’t say? With a name like Bovine?  LOL) and has a great little app menu where we order fried calamari and BBQ beef spring rolls to go along with an excellent selection of beer and only white wines (special for me which was very sweet of them to do).  We still have tons of time after lunch, which is perfect because we need to hit the ATM (which we do at a guarded bank, which makes me happy), then head to Tuk Tuk brewery which we had read about for another beer and wine before our bus boarding time. 

We make friends with Nona, another wine tour passenger who is actually on the cruise with us tomorrow, and spend our remaining time chatting with her in the pub.  There is also another couple on the tour who are currently on the ship but disembarking tomorrow, so we all chat together once we are back on the bus and heading toward our final destination, the Vergenoegd Low winery that uses ducks to keep their vineyard free of insects.  Every afternoon, they have the running of the ducks, where they basically train the ducks to run straight through the rows of vines by funneling them through a little picket lined runway from their pond (of course to the tourists’ delight).  Our visit is schedule to coincide with the running and it is very fun to watch these guys get shooed from the pond down the runway chute.

Afterward we sample 4 wines along with cheese and bread, then are disbursed to shop and hop back on the bus for the ride back into town.  It was a great day – and a fabulous tour that worked out far better than we had ever expected.  Kudos to the tour team who ran everything so wonderfully.  We can only hope this bodes well for our upcoming cruise ship tours (which we have booked an unusual amount of this time around because we had credits and got a huge discount by booking on our last sailing!).

Back at the waterfront, we bid farewell to our new friends and walk toward the Silo Hotel which is an easier place to catch an Uber back to the apartment, passing some cool iron animal statues on the way to… Kaptstat Brauhaus of course!… for one last beer and wine on the waterfront.

Back at the apartment we do indeed finally eat our left overs, which even now are too much for us to finish.  We do our last load of laundry, pack for our embarkation day tomorrow and final follow ups with good wifi.  Then its off to bed, and off to our next adventure in the morning:  The Azamara Quest.