Wacky Wine Weekend

In Oudtshoorn we found a leaflet advertising the Robertson Wacky Wine Weekend. We decided to skip quickly through the other towns along the way and see if what it was all about. It was about wine funnily enough. The whole day was a little bit wierd. The backpackers was full and after making a couple of calls the information office managed to place us with a family round the corner who were helping out by letting out rooms. Their guest room had already been booked so we were allocated their 16 year old daughters room. I must add at this point that the daughter was staying at a friends. We chucked our stuff in the room and went back down to the info place to buy our passport and tasting glass. Gemma didn't much fancy driving me around while I tasted the wine, which I think is awfully selfish of her.

We noticed a sign for a shuttle bus in the first winery we tried and so tried unsuccessfully to find out about it. On leaving that winery we were next to the shuttle stop when an open topped bus stopped, so we leapt aboard and paid our R100 fare. Little did we know at that point that it wasn't the shuttle bus we had boarded, but the 100% non-stop afrikaans party bus. I'm sure that the CD they were playing went by that name too. It appears that the Afrikaaner people have studied eurodisco music very, very hard, isolated the good bits and with a smirk, tossed them away. The volume seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the listenability of the song, which meant it was deafeningly loud for pretty much the whole time we were on the bus. Along with us there were about 8 or 9 of the Afrikaaner party massive on the open deck. They were boogying away and laughin gleefully when the guy in charge handed out paper streamers. They know how to party in rural South Africa. A baby was on board with us and was quite cute, somewhat of a surprise looking at the parents. The mother, who kept feeding him wine, was possibly the ugliest woman I've ever seen, and the father was a demonstration of what the Afrikaaner diet of purely grilled meat can do to you.

At the first winery we had a short 10 minute stop. "Not very long", I thought, "but we'll pack them in at this rate". How wrong I was. We stopped for about 30 minutes at another place while someone found a corkscrew but weren't able to get off the bus as it wasn't a participating place. The next winery was packed and we had about 20 minutes of tasting. Back on the bus we headed back towards town, sailing past wineries. I had a horrible sinking feeling that we would only be getting that. The dancing buffoons continued oblivious. I got off the bus fuming and headed straight for another winery, just wanting to get away from such bad music. I've only been to 1 young farmers do, but it was about 100x cooler than this bus.