SA Trip 0: The Plan

For the last three years my client had imposed a three week shut down for contract staff as a cost saving measure. In anticipation of this happening again, we booked this trip to South Africa way back in January.

The plan was to use airmiles buy one business class return flight and use our Amex 2-for-1 voucher to buy the second. This was scuppered by them changing the rules. As it was we had enough BA miles to scrape together two World Traveller Plus flights: Heathrow / Jo'burg / Cape Town / Heathrow.

Using girl logic - look at the money we've saved on the air fare - we decided to make it a trip of a lifetime and upgrade ourselves to 5-star hotels all the way. This ended up as our final itinerary:

11-15 Madikwe (safari)
15-18 Hermanus (wine)
18-21 Franschhoek (wine)
21-24 Stellenbosch (wine)
24-28 Plettenburg Bay (the garden route)
28-31 Robertson (wine)
31-02 Constantia (wine)

The flight down was overnight. I am lucky and can sleep even in economy. As soon as they served the meal I changed into my jim-jams, put in the ear plugs, put on the eye shades and slept for 7 hours. I woke to the smell of breakfast to discover it had been and gone half an hour before.

Then we landed at Jo'burg about 6:30 their time and the trip had begun!

More on each leg of the trip in following posts...