Hello from an entirely new continent! We finished up our time in Europe (for now) and headed for some cooler weather in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s winter now. When planning our year abroad we wanted to visit places more difficult to reach from the USA (Our planning spreadsheet is of course color coded based on # of connecting flights and total duration from Seattle) so we were excited to visit Southern Africa.
Coming from Europe, we only had to survive one long flight with the kids and flew Turkish Airlines through Istanbul. Blinded by the affordability of the tickets, I missed the fact that the layover from France was from 12am – 2am… but no mater, the Istanbul Airport is apparently just like the Las Vegas Strip, in that it never sleeps. Seriously, it’s an experience all on its own that I would oddly recommend, even with sleep deprived toddlers who had no concept of time but had the energy to ask for every Turkish candy we passed on the LONG walk between connecting gates.
Audio recording below. Look out Dax Shepard, we’ve got one subscriber!
Where Are We?
Our first stop in Africa is South Africa, specifically Cape Town and the near by Winelands. Another brave family from Seattle joined us for the week, with Jake, Katie, Nora (4) and Theo (1.5) taking the multi-long haul journey with “extended” layover in Amsterdam to meet us. Kudos to them for showing up ready to explore after multiple +10 hour flights with a lap infant! We love traveling with other families since it allows for communal parenting and the kids get play partners who never tire of pretending to be Elsa and Anna.
South Africa has been on our travel list since 2020 when Madeline was planning to present at the SpaceOps Conference in Cape Town and I was going to tag along to make it our Babymoon before Mae was born in Fall 2020. Unfortunately, we had to cancel our trip because of the global pandemic, but silver lining is this time around Madeline can drink and, as we found out, there is lots of good wine to be had.
Cape Town shows up on a lot of “the 10 best” lists for place to live, visit, eat etc. and we were excited to see what all the hype was about. We also read about how kid friendly the country was, both from the perspective of activities, friendly populace and lack of Malaria and other dangerous diseases that inflict the more tropical regions of the continent. We are planning to return to Cape Town and travel the famed Garden Route later in August for nearly five weeks, so we will wait till after that to give our final verdict of if it lives up to the press.
Just an hour East of Cape Town is a region known as the Winelands, which is accurately named based on the 100s of wineries there. We stayed at an Airbnb near Stellenbosch, one of the two main wine areas (Franschhoek being the other) and were within driving distance of dozens of great options. The hardest part was deciding which winery to go to: the one with the supervised children’s club or the one with the rentable strider bikes for the on-site race track?. The scenery was also stunning and we enjoyed morning trail runs in the foothills of the mountains through forests and vineyards!
Favorite Experiences
Here were some of our favorite activities from our trip! There is a map at the end of the blog with links and additional details.
Places
- Cable Car – The cable car up Table Mountain is on every “Top Ten” Cape Town list, and for good reason. The kids loved the rotating ride up and the views from the top were unbeatable. There are a ton of clearly marked trails and pathways for the kids to explore and interesting fauna (see “dassie”) as well.
- V&A Waterfront – This area of Cape Town is essentially a giant shopping and dining area. It was very clean, safe and fun to look around. The highlight for the kids was the Ferris Wheel.
- Boulder Beach – Who doesn’t love a beach full of penguins?!? We drove by the famed beach on our way out to the Winelands, make sure to take the route that goes along the Chapman’s Peak Drive. The beach was definitely touristy, but there were enough penguins for everyone. Emmett particularly loved finding the baby ones hiding in their burrows.
- Seapoint/Greenpoint – We stayed in this area do to the apparent walkability to the sites in Cape Town but overall felt somewhat “meh” about it. The Seapoint promenade along the ocean and Green Point playgrounds were cool, but with how easy it was to Uber (and that you had to Uber vs walk after dark for safety reasons) we might have stayed somewhere else.
Food (& Wine)
- Oranjezicht City Farmers Markets – This may end up being Madeline’s favorite place we visit all year. Imagine the best farmers market you’ve ever seen in the US, now double it’s size, add Belgian chocolate strawberries and fire sales being called out over the PA system and you can see why.
- Brunches – Cape Town food was surprisingly vegetarian friendly and the brunches were excellent with the shakshuka and “babychinos” (mini kids steamed milk) everywhere. We didn’t have a bad breakfast anywhere, but special call out for Cooked and Cushty Neighborhood deli near us.
- Wineries – I can’t say enough good things about these in a single blog post. The views, food, kids activities and wine were all excellent. We’ve drug our kids along to wineries, but our attention is on keeping the kids content for more than 30 minutes. At the South African wineries, it was the kids crying when we said it was time to leave 3 HOURS LATER. To put it in perspective, we originally planned to only go to two, but ended up going to six(!) over four days since the kids and adults enjoyed it so much. Here were some of our favorites:
- Borschendal- The first one we visited that upended our understanding of what a winery could be. We stayed here all day, enjoy breakfast, kids juice tasting, an amazing playground and picnic lunch. We didn’t even get to the 10km of running/horse riding trails.
- Blaauwklippen – So awesome we actually went back twice. There was a farmers market, world food court, and rental bikes for toddlers and older kids with tracks to ride on. Emmett was in heaven.
- Villiera – We picked this one specifically because it was located on a reserve with a game drive! so after drinking their namesake champagne, we boarded a safari rover and drove through their property where we saw giraffes, springbok, zebras, and chameleons to name a few.
- Spier Wine Farm – I should probably mention the wine at least once, and Spier was our favorite. We did the winter soup paring, which was awesome, and the grounds are stunning. The kids had a lot of fun running the hills and playing with the magic “singing rocks” that make noise when you go near them.
Family Moments
- Our First Braai – In South Africa, every home has a “braai” or charcoal grill, as we call it in the States. We really enjoyed sitting with Jake and Katie in the backyard of our Airbnb in Stellenbosch, watching the sunset while the girls played “Frozen” upstairs and boys played with a ball in the yard.
- Kid Juice Tastings – Several wineries (Borschendal, Spier) offered kids juice tastings with snacks. The girls loved being fancy and talking about which one they prefered. Emmett dipped his potatoe chips in them.
- Per Mae: Favorite moment was “The Ferris Wheel” – Mae loved the lines, excitement, and views with the Ferris Wheel at the V&A Waterfront.
- Per Emmett: Favorite moment was “bike” – Emmett “love love loves” his strider bike at home and was so happy to find bikes at multiple of the wineries we visited. We let him ride for literal hours and he never tired of it.
Tips & Lessons Learned
This is where we put all of the things we learned along the way about traveling in the region as well as traveling in general with toddlers.
About Cape Town, South Africa:
- Getting Around Cape Town – While the distances aren’t great, we found that not a lot of people, local or tourist, really were walking around Cape Town. Since most of the buildings have 6ft walls around them, it wasn’t a very charming walk either. Uber’s were easy and super cheap, <$5 to get anywhere, so would recommend taking those to most places.
- Winery Reservations – Even though we were in winter, the wineries were well attended and we missed out on a few exciting farm-to-table meals because we didn’t book ahead. Booking a few days ahead would have been sufficient.
- Safety – There are a ton of forum posts and questions about “is Cape Town Safe”? Over all we felt very safe on our trip and everyone was super kind, especially to the kids. We followed the basic rules of keeping all valuables out of site (in pockets) and not walking around at night. It was the 6ft walls, electric fences and security patrols that made you ironically feel unsafe versus any actual person. Only note is be sure to take an Uber or precoordinated ride from the airport. Our group almost had some credit card info stolen from a very friendly taxi driver at payment.
- Remnants of Apartheid – In our travels of Cape Town the lasting effects of Apartheid were very apparent, with the huge financial inequality front and center. Every place we visited (touristy and local shop) had 100% white customer and 100% black workers, despite the country being over 80% black. An interesting one was that we couldn’t figure out why Google maps tried to reroute us away from driving along the coast on our way out from Cape Town to Stellenbosch but then found that it was actually trying to have us avoid driving next to the 2nd largest township in South Africa. We obviously chose to visit this country and many white owned locations (aka 98% of the wineries), but we’ve started to learn more about it and opportunities for better dispersing at least our tourist dollars. Robben Island (Where Nelson Mandela among others were imprisoned) was actually closed during the first time here but we plan to visit when we come back.
About Traveling with Toddlers:
- Airbnb’s with Toys– Any new to our kids toys are hit for entertainment. The new stimulation was fantastic for kid and parent alike and will definitely be a major selling point as we look at future places to stay. One caution, though, is not to mix the house toys with the personal ones. We spent a long time sorting which were ours vs the houses on departure.
- Luggage Straps for Car Seats – The gear MVP of the week were the Luggage Straps we brought to help la. Figuring out Ubers and wanting to bring carseats.
wow what a wonderful time and description of all you have done. Blessings and safe travels
The best Chardonnay I ever had (so far) was from South Africa, consumed at a charming bistro in Edinburgh. I have a pic of the label, but have never found it available in the US, and even the intrepid guys at Great Wine Buys haven’t found an importer.
Are the Penguins not protected from human encroachment? They would be in NZ.
What’s the name of the wine?? We’ve had some good chardonnays here and tried a new one – Pinotage which is another new fave.
The penguins are endangered and they restrict tourists to a raised boardwalk at this particular beach. I guess there are beaches nearby where the penguins have gone too but those don’t have the same access restrictions.