A marquee trip.

South Africa | Dec 22 - Jan 1, 2024

A marquee trip. Our biggest concern now is that we will never have as good of a vacation ever again.
In regards to kimim; Esther made it very easy to plan a trip that we found overwhelming. All of our activities, and transportation handled and executed flawlessly. Our preferences address, and planned for to ensure the trip delivered everything we wanted from our travel budget. Kagiso and Lucy were our mom's in country, their advice, insight, and quick responses took all the stress out of travel. They were friendly and seamed genuinely interested in how things were going and what kind of experiences we were having
In regards to specific events/vendors.

We found the hop on hop off bus easy, informative, and comprehensive in Cape town (blue line)

The botanical garden was nice. Worth seeing, but would have been nice to know that it was part of our cape point tour.

Cape point was really very good; penguins really delivered, which was lucky because of the fires. Our driver found a back way to ensure we got to hit this spot, and stayed late to drop us at a pharmacy- very nice man

On Dec25th our transfer driver stayed an hour longer than expected when the restaurant took longer with our food than is usual. Nice guy

The hotel in cape town had an incredible view of table mountain, and was so close to restaurants and shopping, it was ideal

Our hotel in Franshoek also had an incredible view of mount Rochel. I stared at the sunset for what felt like an hour watching the clouds swirl. The service and food were excellent, the location ideal to experience the city. They did some some trouble with the pipes, and the smell of pipe cleaner. But we just covered the drains, and aired out the room before going to sleep

I have already written about the bikes n wines guide Eon, but to reiterate, he went over and above, even so far as to ride through injury (we did not tell him to do that)

In Hoedsrpuit. our canyon tour guide Jason, was very candid about his life and growing up in S. Africa, one of the more interesting conversations we had. And he pushed ot make sure we saw everything possible with the time provided

Our first hotel was in a private game reserve that we could walk through- unbelievably nice. We woke up to a waterbuck outside our window. The kind of thing we didn't even know was possible/existed. Had some incredible walks.

Kapama is the ultimate destination. The pinnacle of the trip. We cried. We loved the staff, we loved the animals, we had the most incredible time. We will be talking about it for the rest of our lives.