Veg Warriors in Cape Town

It is now almost a year since we moved to Chile and this blog so far covered our frequent ups and and occasional downs. For the next few weeks, however, it will turn into something of a travel blog as we are not actually in Chile at the moment.

A couple of months ago it became apparent that Patricia is going to have to go to South Africa for a week in order to run a training session for her colleagues in the Cape Town office. In addition to that, conference visits, more training, meetings and family visits were overdue in Europe.

As we are a bit self-conscious of our air mile excessive ex-pat lifestyle we tried to combine one with the other. OK, South Africa is not exactly on the way to Europe, but two separate return flights to South Africa AND Europe would mean be the equivalent of one round-the-world trip, whereas South America - South Africa - Europe and back to South America works out at "only" roughly 75% of that distance. Despite this 25% "saving", Atmosfair calculates for the latter itenerary still about 8 tons of greenhous gas emissions, which is twice the annual figue of an average Chileno/a. Oh dear...

So, Christian made it his mission to find some flights without getting involved with the silly game that airlines like to play with their potential customers which is trying to sell stupidly routed connections. They must all have huge over-capacities or maybe kerosene is too cheap or how can they possibly afford to carry customers huge detours around the planet at lower costs than the more direct flights which the competition is offering? Apart from that, who in the right mind would want to fly from South America to Southern Africa via North America or Europe?! Perhaps a little fuel and/or CO2 tax would help to stop this stupidity?

Having eventually been successful in booking some sensible flights, our air mile stinginess nearly bit us in the @r$e on the day of our departure: Some South African bureaucrat must have decided at some point that anyone travelling through Argentina needs to have a Yellow Fever certificate or won't be allowed to board a South Africa bound plane.  Even if it's only a 60min stop-over at the Buenos Aires airport, like in our case.

Now, we don't want to play down the dangers of Yellow Fever, or dismiss the laudable efforts of avoiding its accidental import into South Africa.  However, the chance of catching the disease in Buenos Aires is zero. Even the odd rogue mosquito that may have travelled by plane from an Yellow Fever area to Buenos Aires wouldn't make it into the terminal building, thanks to the practice of spraying the cabins of in- and outbound flights with insecticides. Passengers included, no kidding!

To make a long story short, we were nearly denied boarding and were given completely misinformed advise by airline staff in Santiago (i.e. "Just go get your vaccination quickly before departure..."), were nearly denied boarding for a second time in Buenos Aires and only got through by abandoning the German approach (ie "stick with the rules!") in favour of a more "southern" approach (ie "if the rule is stupid how can we get around it?!"). The alternative would have been a missed flight, a cancelled training session, another missed onward flight to Europe - or in other words: a real head ache. Fortunately, we did make it to Cape Town and after all this palaver it was also only a minor inconvenience that our suitcases still haven't arrived...

This was not the first time we had problems flying into or out of South America - we've previously had one flight over-booked and another one simply cancelled on us last minute. Therefore we had arranged to travel a couple of days before the start of Patricia's training. Having eventually arrived as scheduled we had the chance to overcome jetlag and do a little sight seeing in Cape Town, including the following:

• we stayed in B&B made of cob...

• ... and became regulars at the Bolo Bolo plant based cafe and book store in Muizenberg (best vegan food we've had in a while! Mhhhh, Turkish Delight smoothies - carob, peanut butter, banana, dates, & soy milk!)
• We also reconnected a bit with a part of Cape Town that Christian once used to be very familiar with, penguins in Simons Town included

• We ventured to the Neighbourgoods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill where we sampled some super delicious mushroom kebabs...

• ... and joined Patricia's colleagues for an early Sunday morning 10k race around the centre of Cape Town

We have another couple of days next weekend, maybe if the weather is nice we'll try to climb table mountain. And maybe our suitcases will even get here in the end.