Thursday 11th January

We hired a car to get around in and headed up Table Mountain - what beautiful views. The clouds were coming over the edge of part of the mountain and that's why locals nick-name it table cloth mountain. There are lots of indigenous plants on top of the mountain including a number of varieties of Proteus.

The city is great - very easy to get around. We walked down to the Waterfront and to Green Market Square to the craft markets.

After that we headed to Cape Point and then on to see the african penguins on Boulder Beach. We drove past places called Llandudno and Simonstown so I had to take photo's of course.

We drove back through Plumstead where Kate used to live and stopped off at Pirates where she worked. I had the best steak ever - melt in the mouth - mmmm - sure beats the goat curry in Africa!

Friday 12th January

We headed out to Spier which is one of the vineyards in the Stellenbosch area for a horseback tour of the vineyard. I finally learned to canter. Hooray!

Afterwards we went into the cheetah sanctuary they have on site where we got up close and personal with a cheetah. They also have birds of prey here too and we watched the display in the afternoon. It's an interactive thing where they give you all gloves and put bits of meat on the gloves so the birds will sit on your arm.

We then followed this with a little bit of wine tasting - mmmmm. Very nice.

Then it was back for more birds of prey - we got talking with one of the staff there and he invited us to feed two of the larger owls - inside the cage. It was excellent - except with everone watching I kind of felt like I was part of the show too!

The seafood here is wonderful - we ate at The Greek Fisherman and had a seafood mezze. Just delicious.

We had hoped to go to Robben Island which is the prison where Nelson Mandela was incracerated - but we didn't realise you needed to have booked quite far in advance. So we'll have to save that until the next time we return.

Saturday 13th January

We went to another vineyard called Neethlingshof which was a gorgeous setting but the wine wasn't as nice. So we headed back to Spier and had a look around the Diamond Boutique and went on their Wine Education Tasting. The lady running it was an international wine taster - what a great job.