Oh, duh: Cologne

December 2011 took us to Cologne for Christkindlmarkts and gluhwein and all that festive jazz.

The main feature of Cologne is its cathedral (or "Dom"). Despite being surrounded by a major station, a large bridge and various buildings, all of which were flattened in the war, the Dom survived more or less unscathed. Cologne has an "old town" but it's not all that old so the Dom is the most picturesque thing there.  Fortunately it's huge and you see it from more or less anywhere.

Yep, still huge at night.

You can find out how huge it is by climbing the 580-odd steps to the top, pausing halfway to admire the bells.

And then the rest of the way up.  Most of it is a fairly small spiral staircase used for both ascent and descent.  So you'd better not mind other people.  One guy was carrying his wheely suitcase all the way to the top and back.

Nice view from the top, mind.

Detail of the view of the top from the bottom.

Cologne is famous for its Christmas markets.  Seven of them this year. Most of them are nice.  One of them is  on a cruise boat on the river, charges EUR2 entry, and is full of tat.  So I think six would have been fine.  They get pretty busy, especially the one by the Dom (below).

Cologne has a few excellent museums. The East Asian Art Museum particularly appealed to me - most of its space was given open to a temporary exhibition on Japanese painting 1400-1900, which was full of great stuff (including a fantastic double screen painting of a dragon and a tiger that took me back to Kyoto).

The huge modern art museum, Museum Ludwig, is pretty good too (esp if you're a fan of Warhol and Lichtenstein).

 And I didn't know Cologne used to be a Roman town (I must have missed that volume of Asterix) but it has a lot of well-preserved remains (Lilly loved a cameo of Augustus), mainly in a museum next to Ludwig but also a harder-to-find site near the Rathaus which preserves the remains of buildings and a Roman sewer (below).

And the German museum of sport and Olympics is pretty decent (although don't expect to get to try too many of the activities if your visit coincides with schoolkids).  I learned that the best way to win the German goal of the year competition is some kind of overhead kick.  Lilly learned a lot about the Berlin Olympics. Now that's teamwork.

(okay, I did the easy one)

And, inevitably, there's one war-related museum (the old Gestapo HQ complete with basement prison cells) to keep Lilly happy.

The rail and foot bridge over the Rhine is impressive and has been seized on by romantic couples who have attached thousands of padlocks to it (mostly engraved or written on).

Amazingly, there's nobody on the bridge selling padlocks, but a short walk down the riverbank to a kiosk yielded a result (and the loan of a sharpie).  Guess which one's ours.  No helping, Lilly!

Some people have gone a bit too far:

Of course, Cologne is pretty typical of Germany when it comes to food and drink, so plenty of pig and lager.  The local beer of choice is Kölsch, served (frequently) to your table in 20cl glasses and totted up on your beermat, which makes a nice souvenir.  There are about 30 local breweries, and no we didn't get to sample the full set (most venues only serve one type).  A few also brew malt beer. Hellers was our favourite local independent brewhaus.

The Malzmuhle is a nice old Bierhaus just off the beaten track.

A few samplers.

 

Mmm, pretzel

Rheinland being full of Bundesliga teams, we took ourselves to see Bayer Leverkeusen play Nuremberg. (Leverkeusen is a small industrial town basically set up to service pharmaceutical giant Bayer, just 20 minutes by train, with a very efficient website and print-at-home tickets.) It's then a pleasant walk along a river (which is hopefully not full of chemicals) to the impressive modern stadium.  No, they haven't put up a statue of Lilly: that's really her.

 You can even get beer and pretzels delivered to your seat! If you go through the hassle of getting a proprietary card and queuing up at the end to get your deposit back, since they don't take cash.

Leverkeusen were "celebrating" drawing Barcelona in the QF of the Champions League and, since it was the last match before the Christmas break, they gave a gift to every fan (a small torch).  They also gave three gifts to newly-promoted Nuremberg in a shocking home performance, with Michael Ballack outstandingly bad.  Ah well.  Kudos to the away fans who put on a sustained display of drum-banging, singing and bouncing that I haven't seen outside South America.

It rained a bit too much (and the river was impressively high), but we still got around town to take in the random sights.  No snow, sadly.

You could knock off the best museums in a day and do your Christmas markets in another, so four days was a slight stretch, but Germany's always a fun place to be.  And the journey home is made more palatable by the fact that German airports are twelve times as efficient as English ones (even on Easyjet).  Prost!

Lilly & Paul Go Around the World - Photos Highlight Package

I have finally been through all the photos from our big trip and come up with a highlights package of 277. Should be more manageable than the 10,000 we took! You can find them here if you are interested (you'll need to copy & paste the link):

http://picasaweb.google.com/lgallafent/LillyPaulGoAroundTheWorldAbridgedVersion#

Vino, Vidding, Fishy

 (As Julius Caesar definitely didn't say)

On Friday we left Cape Town driving north through the Western Cape, which appears to be sparsely populated, hot away from the coast, and fairly scenic, especially up in the Cederberg Wilderness Area where ancient geology has left shrubbery dotted over carved mountains forming an orange and green frame to wide valleys.

It's not a proper travelogue photo unless you take it from a moving vehicle

Up here, it's all about the journey not the destination (except when your journey is interrupted for 10-20 minutes for roadworks that have brought a mile or more of road down to a single lane so that they can work on 100 metres of it at a time).

Our actual destination is Clanwilliam, which is a one horse town and even the horse leaves on Sundays (as we discovered when we tried to find lunch and dinner within 50km the day after the wedding). But the church for the wedding was really nice - simple whitewashed walls and yellow flowers - and the wedding went off very well. Unfortunately I was painfully aware that the positioning of the video camera trained on the happy couple meant that I would be in the background just to one side of them throughout the ceremony, and so despite a scorching hot day I had to make absolutely sure I didn't nod off during the sermon.

 The happy couple - congrats guys!

Then we all piled into a bus to head to the bride's family's estate 10km outside town, a beautiful 1920s farmhouse set against a stunning mountain backdrop. A refreshing breeze and a couple of drinks sustained us through to dinner in a classy marquee, and I have to say it was a brilliant venue with many thoughful touches for the day (loved the table plan written on hearts hung from a tree) and we had a great evening.

Many thanks to Karen and Gav for inviting us and we wish them a very happy married life.

 The gradual blurring of Lilly's picture is intended to represent her evening

60km west on the coast is Lambert's Bay, to which we all headed the night before the wedding for a famous braais (or barbecue, as popular here as you'd expect given the amount of sunshine). We were a bit bemused to find that it was held in what looked like the first shack an enterprising caveman ever pulled together, and caught unawares by very cold sea breezes. My fish-eating fellow diners gave it a very good report (even though our too-early arrival had caused us to discover that some of the fish was frozen), and the seafood carried on coming for some time while I waited over an hour for something that wasn't fish to finish cooking.
There are a few other small towns up here - we stopped for lunch at Citrusdal - but nothing to really hold your interest beyond the scenery.

For our last day or so we drove back down to Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, just outside Cape Town and the heart of wine country. It feels like a different country entirely - somewhere in southern Europe, perhaps, with picturesque 19th century buildings and fancy restaurants.

A quarter of Stellenbosch and the whole of Franzhhoek seem to be put on entirely for tourists to have a base while they drive around the many dozens of wineries that take up almost every inch of space here in between the mountains.

My turn to be designated driver so Lilly could enjoy the vino while I enjoyed the views - Guardian Peak had the best view of the half-dozen we visited (see photo below), but against some stiff competition and many beautiful estates.

You could pass a few relaxing days here quite easily.

 Chocolates paired with wine at this one

 Just a bit of mist in the background on our last day

Designated driver from the POV of designated drinker

And that's it: time to go home again. Very enjoyable holiday all round, very glad we came.

The Great SA Cape

The first impression of Cape Town is always going to be of Table Mountain. I firmly maintain that every city would be improved by a great big scenic mountain, and we should give up on the Olympics and import a huge pile of rocks into the East End of London. Table Mountain is fairly scenic in its own right but in a meteorological phenomenon I don't quite understand, it often ends up with its top swathed in clouds (the 'tablecloth') even when there isn't another cloud in the sky. Just a couple of hours after getting to Cape Town we found ourselves on a balcony with a beer watching the cloud roll across the mountain at surprising speed. It has quite a wow factor.

 Table Mountain and Cape Town from Blouberg

Cape Town can be unbelievably windy and the first time we tried to go up the mountain the cable car was closed, so we eventually made it up on Thursday afternoon. Because of the improbable cloud, you have to pick your day carefully (and tip: beat big queues by buying a ticket online, it's valid for 2 weeks). The tablecloth was forming when we got up there, so we had spectacular views in 3 directions but didn't bother doing a long walk for a southerly view - as the cloud gradually rolled over us we realised that, yep, you really can't see a thing through it.

Well worth going up - in a nice but disconcerting touch, the cable car has a revolving floor so everyone gets a decent view on the way up. (You can walk up but I'd played football the previous day so thought we'd take the easy option for once. We bumped into friends at the top who vindicated our decision by telling us it had taken them 4-1/2 hours and, yes, they would be taking the cable car down.)

On Tuesday we drove around the side of Table Mountain and down the east coast of the cape, first to Muisenberg to take photos of colorful beach huts (a great expanse of beach crawling with tiny marine life, with a lovely backdrop of False Bay), and then on to Kalk Bay and Simon's Town for lunch.

All of these feel like little English seaside towns but with better weather, which was doing its best to make up for the previous 2 days with one of several scorchers. In late October, a scorcher in CT is perfect weather - not quite too hot because the breeze off the sea keeps you cool.

Just beyond Simon's Town is a penguin sanctuary at Boulders Beach - you have to pay to go down to the two beaches to see the penguins, which are mostly lying around doing nothing in the afternoon sun, although you can also see quite a few for free on the side of the walk between the beaches.

 This penguin says "Hello Esther!"

We did see 3 active penguins on the beach by the boulders, as they appeared on the beach, waddled into the water, swam at and just around a wading Lilly, and then waddled up through a small gap between boulders and off towards all the other penguins. Lilly emulated them with a quick swim in a very cold sea.

Oh yeah, and this bright red 3-inch-long insect.  Lilly refused to handle it so the photo could show the scale

 At the bottom of the cape is Cape Point national park, which is certainly scenic enough to merit a visit - a drive and a walk takes you up to the old Cape Point lighthouse, and then round to the Cape of Good Hope which is the southernmost tip of the cape (but not the country) and unbelievably windy.

 Lilly demonstrates the hat shell be wearing to Ascot next year

That's the Cape of Good Hope at back left

I made my way out onto the rocks for a photo, nearly lost my sunglasses to the wind when I turned round, and came back covered in sea salt.

 Lilly's hair demonstrates the wind slightly better than mine

Finally we drove back up the West Coast, a truly stunning drive, especially with the late afternoon sun, for a sundowner near the beaches of Camps Bay. Recommended.

This is Hour Bay, part of a great drive

Cape Town is definitely a good place to have a car - it's an easy place to drive (hard to get lost with Table Mountain always visible and the centre has a simple grid); public transport is very limited and there are quite a few good places to visit away from the centre; and parking is easy. There are a lot of 'parking guards' throughout CA - it's casual employment, ie they work for tips, but they will keep an eye on your car and you give them a little tip when you get back. These ubiquitous guards also make the place feel a bit safer since you're rarely on an empty street, and they'll help direct you in and out of tight spaces.

On Wednesday we drove up to Blouberg and Big Bay, which boast long sandy beaches and a great view of Cape Town with Table Mountain in the background (see also above).

There's a brand new development here with what look like decent options for a scenic lunch or dinner, though we were too early. Instead we had lunch at the Waterfront, a big area of the docks that has been turned into a shopping and eating area - it maybe feels just slightly too sanitised and tourist fodder, but still a pleasant area to pass a couple of hours.

In the evening we had a football match - a rather cobbled together and patched up team consisting of some friends from university, and some other friends and family of the groom. Under the circumstances losing 6-3 felt respectable, and the local side we played against were a decent bunch. I had a good chat with one of them about career-threatening and deliberate fouls, but I should stress that this was nothing to do with anything that happened in the match.

Yes, our mascot is dressed as a tramp.  He'll calm down when someone gives him a can of beer

 In our last day and a bit, we ticked off a few of CT's noted museums. The slave lodge was fairly pointless - hint to museums, if you're devoting an entire room to a *replica* of a table on which something once happened, you probably need to try a bit harder. (A temporary exhibit on Mandela is quite informative, albeit just a lot of text on walls, but if you go through the permanent collection to it, you will eventually realise that you're reading it backwards. Great planning.) The District 6 museum - devoted to the stories of coloured people who were relocated from this part of CT - has a bit more imagination but the few stories I had the energy to read were banal, and I imagine your time would be better spent with a book on the subject. The South Africa National Gallery is the best of the three, although part of it was closed to put in a new installation. A large photography exhibition and a smaller career retrospective were nicely staged.

All of these are in the centre, along with an airy little park (named The Company's Gardens), the colourful houses in the Bo-Kaap (Muslim area), cheap souvenirs in Greenmarket (Lilly bought a vuvuzela to add atmosphere at our football match), and the bars, shops and cheap hotels of Long Street, where we were staying.

 The Bo-Kaap - I was tempted to burn out the car on the left to make for a better photo, but there was probably a car guard somewhere in the vicinity

Crime is always a bit of a worry in SA - the Garden Route is pretty safe but even here hotels will suggest you don't walk outside the busiest streets at night just in case. All the coastal areas just around CT felt fine but this central area is the one where a bit of extra care feels necessary - and I was happy to park an empty zero-excess rental car on the street here overnight, but I'd be less happy with my own. Having said that, we didn't have any problems and it's handy to be so central. We were easily able to sample the local Nando's (good mains, disappointing sides, one song stuck on loop the whole time) and find somewhere for a drink - the most surprising being inside an exceedingly noisy Irish pub post-football, when we discovered that the upstairs was trying to be a classy piano bar, albeit with the vibrations of downstairs massaging you through your chair. But there's plenty of choice on Long Street, lots of them with balconies.

So we enjoyed CT - 4 nights felt about right (we missed the botanical gardens and decided not to bother with Robben Island), and highly recommend a car for at least a day or two to see the cape.

Now we're off to a wedding, then back to the vicinity of CT to see the vineyards of Stellenbosch...