Results tagged “Cape Town” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Hello city-lovers! Today's city of choice is Cape Town, Africa's Mother City, and it comes at the hands of Laura Trisnadi.

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The Mother City is My City

The first place I take a visitor from out of town is Table Mountain.

When I crave ice cream I always go Marcel's.

To escape the city I head out on a drive around The Mountain to False Bay.

If I want to drink wine I go to the wine farms in Stellenbosch or Franschhoek.

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

Let me say upfront that it's an incredible privilege to be able to travel around the world with my family for a year, especially during a time when there's so much economic uncertainty. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.  But as fulfilling as it is to show the boys all the wonderful places we've been, being around each other pretty much 24/7 for such a long stretch can be quite testing at times--on all of us. That's why we were enthusiastically counting down the days to when a group of our friends (including some good buddies Tyler and Stefan grew up with) would be meeting us in Cape Town for a two-week tour of South Africa. So besides being excited about arriving in one of my favorite countries, we were getting a much welcomed release that would allow us to take a break from constantly being around each other. Plus, the boys would have kids their age to be with after more than three months without such company. Yeehaw!     

As delighted as I was to be seeing everyone, I was also quite anxious. When our friends decided they wanted to connect with us in Africa, I told them to trust me in arranging everything and that I would put together a game plan everyone would be happy with. Easily being one of my favorite places, I sold them on South Africa pretty hard, guaranteeing that it would be the best family vacation they'd ever have. Since I had been to the country on four separate occasions and had experience with the proposed itinerary, I felt reasonably confident it would deliver. So I handed a wish list to an operator called Footprints Africa, and they made all the pieces come together.  

So why South Africa? When most people consider traveling to Africa, going on a safari is usually a prime motivator. Being fortunate to have been on a few before, all in South Africa, I can attest that it is life changing and certainly ranks as a top highlight of my all my travel experiences. I haven't been to Botswana, Tanzania, or Kenya (yet), which all undoubtedly have some of the best game viewing around, but what I've heard from those who know is that South Africa offers perhaps the widest variety of wildlife, all within a relatively small space. Unlike the massive planes of the Serengeti, Kruger National Park and it's private game reserves have much thicker bush, which brings in the diversity, but not in the large numbers found elsewhere on the continent.