May 2025

I haven’t posted for almost two years now, mainly because managing the photos had become so onerous. The more we traveled, the more photos I had to look through, and I felt I had become a slave to my pictures. Then, just the other day, I began to wonder what I was going to do with all the photos? So, I decided to resume the blog, but, to ease my way back in, I am starting with a short post on the last place we visited at the end of our 6 week trip in April – May.

As a child, I never knew where Potsdam (population: 183,000) was, but I knew of the Potsdam Declaration. Yes, that’s the document signed by Truman, Churchill & Chiang Kai-shek spelling out the terms of surrender for Japan at the end of WW2. Through the terms of the agreement, Korea earned its independence from Japan. When we first began to visit Berlin, I noticed that Potsdam was almost a southwestern suburb of Berlin. Potsdam figures hugely in the history of Prussia and Germany, and the remnants of its old glory has been honored by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.

We took the S7 train (Euro 3.80) from the Zoological Garden station in Berlin and arrived at the terminal station of Potsdam in under 30 minutes.

Everyone seemed to be heading in the same direction from the station so we followed the crowd. In a few minutes, we crossed a bridge and, while some people continued on the big road, we turned right along the river and came to this area in the picture above.

This is the old town center that has a palace, museums, the old city hall, St. Nicolas Church, and the old market square.

We kept walking through a park and reached the Catholic church of Sts. Peter and Paul. This is the Dutch Quarter, the area of the old Dutch settlement, where the skilled artisans from the Netherlands came to live.

The main pedestrian street of the city, Brandenburger Street, starts from this church. At this point, it was barely 11 AM and most restaurants were not yet open.

We were in Potsdam on Ascension Thursday, a holiday in Germany, so most stores, including, sadly, this one, were closed.

We were hungry and managed to find an open restaurant, a pan Asian restaurant that had sushi, dumplings etc. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of food and service. The price was also reasonable.

Brandenburger street ends at the Brandenburg Gate. This is much smaller than the one in Berlin, but it looked about right for the spot.

The Protestant Church of Peace stands right outside one of the entrances to Sanssouci Park. It is peaceful inside and outside the church which was modeled after medieval Italian monasteries.

Frederick the Great named his summer palace Sans Souci,which is French for without care. Obviously he intended it as a place to chill.

.Most visitors to Potsdam end up in Sanssouci Park to see the Terraced Gardens and the Palace.. There’s no way I could take a photo of the compound to show the size of the terraces with my humble phone.

By the time we had finished walking around the Palace area, we were tired. Sanssoucci Park is huge! Luckily(?), Orangery Palace, a must see and at least a half a mile away, was closed for renovations, we decided we’d seen enough & headed back.

This time we took the big road from the Brandenburg Gate back to the station. There were some interesting buildings to look at along the way, as well as the Potsdam sign in the first photo in this post and the Film museum.

June 2022

South Africa produces over 10% of the world’s wine, which puts it in the number 8 position according to a statistics aggregation site. Most wineries in South Africa are in the Cape region, and visiting wineries is considered a must do while in Cape Town. None of us were serious wine drinkers, but wineries often offer more than just wine & could be fun to visit, we all agreed to make the trip. Most winery tours seemed to go east from Cape Town to Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, so I decided to hire the same car service (about $30 per person) from our previous outing and make a day out of it. I gave my list to the driver, he took one look at it, and said, “leave it up to me!” I said fine. He certainly would know better than I! The drive was under an hour to the first stop.

The dark brown symbols show where we’ve been, the others are possible points of interest

La Motte winery was the first stop. Our driver said it was the oldest in Fraschhoek, the French immigrant wine makers’ town, producing wine since 1752. It was too early to start drinking, but just walking around the ground was wonderful. Their building and gardens were filled with art.

Next we stopped at Franschhoek town shown above. 300 French Huguenots settled in here in 1688 and turned it into a French town. It only has about 1,000 residents now, but it attracts tourists from all over the world. It looked like a one main street town, but there were many understated fancy eateries and stores lining the street. Yes, a cute little town. Cute & little, an accent mark on both.

Franschhoek Pass Lookout Point was up the road from town.

Two friends from our group had their birthdays to celebrate around that time, thus, I picked a view restaurant associated with a winery for the occasion. A 2 course lunch was excellent and a bargain at about $18 (or $22 for 3 courses; the two birthday girls got the latter). We enjoyed it so much that we forgot to take a picture till the last course.

Boschendal is one of the best known wineries in South Africa, and our driver thought we should check it out. Another attractive place with an artsy interior and interesting shops. There even was a grocery market with fresh deli and bakery items on sale.

Originally, I was planning to stop in Stellenbosch (population: 21,800), the hub town in this wine region. But we were too tired. We visited 3 out of 2,600+ wineries in South Africa, thus, we can hardly say we know about South African wineries. But we did have a nice taste of the sophistication and depth of the wine producing culture in South Africa in Fraschhoek.

All the wineries we stopped at had wines on sale that were priced quite attractively. However, we were heading back to the U.S. in a couple of days & there was only so much we could pack in the suitcases. Too bad, too bad.. Pat kept saying.

itinerary: Johannesburg -> Safari -> Victoria Falls -> Cape Town -> Cape of Good Hope -> Franschhoek

June 2022

The Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve (admission: about $22) was a 90 minute drive south from Cape Town. We went there using a car service (about $300 for the all day service in a 12 person van) we learned about through gettransfer.com.

The dark brown symbols show where we’ve been, the others are possible points of interest

Within the reserve, we first went to the Cape Point Lighthouse where we took the funicular (about $5 R/T) up to have the incredible view seen below.

We drove about 2.3 Km to go to the Cape of Good Hope with the famous signage. Like many people, I knew the Cape of Good Hope as the southern tip of Africa, but it was not. So now the sign says, “most south-western point” of Africa. No matter. Every single visitor wanted a photo hugging the sign so someone cleverly expanded the sign with two wings to shorten the waiting time.

Lunch was at a little French cafe in Simon’s Town (population: 6,500) called Lighthouse Cafe. The delicious meal in cute French country style ambiance was never captured because we were all too hungry. Priorities.

Another major attraction in the area were the penguins. A pair of penguins were brought to Boulders Beach in 1982 for breeding, and now there are 3,000 of them just hanging out. The admission fee of about $4 to the colony was totally worth it.

We took the scenic Chapman Peak Drive, a toll (about $3) road, on the west coast on the way back.

We stopped at the viewpoint overlooking Haut Bay. I was looking forward to getting some sea food from the Bay Harbour Market, but it was closed by then. The driver took us to a huge supermarket where we found all sorts of goodies on the way home, and we were happy.

itinerary: Johannesburg -> safari -> Victoria Falls -> Cape Town