Fruit-picking has been an activity I heard so many times and always wanted to do. If you have read all my articles, you must have memorized the information about the ideal climate in the Western Cape Province. This paved way to not only wine farms but also all the other types of farms.
Basically, there are many farms which you can enter with your basket by paying a small fee and pick as many fruits as you wish. You must be a very boring person not to be intrigued by this.
Babylonstoren is one of the oldest farms in the region, founded in late 17th century. It was inhabitated by nomadic Khoisan people prior to that. Simon van der Stel, the governor of the Cape Colony, granted the area to a burgher called Pieter van der Byl who planted the first vineyards and fruits as well as arranging sufficient water supply. Source
Babylonstoren is about 60 km to the northeast of Cape Town, near the town of Paarl.
The main historic structures were all built according to the Dutch Architecture.
The fruits you can pick will depend on the season. This time of the year, it was full of lemons and guavas most of which were ripe. One of the advantages of this farm was that they were not using insecticides on the fruits. Instead, in order to attract the flies and other insects elsewhere, they built what is called "the bug hotel". This wooden structure consisted of firewoods of different shapes and with different sizes of pores for the flies to nest.
The farm is also full of historic and even prehistoric trees. The one you see below is a cycad species. Cycad is a type of tree which thrived in the age of dinosaurs and still survived to day. Of 300 total cycad species, 37 are found in South Africa. These trees can live for up to hundred years. When you take a quick glimpse at them, they look like the trees from arcade games like Super Mario, and Islander, don't you think?
There is a restaurant and wine tasting opportunity, and obviously everything has been organically produced first-hand from the eggs to honey and wine. We weren't hungry, so we preferred to stroll around the plantations, fruit trees and flowers.
A bonus attraction for you to visit after the picnic: Afrikaans Language Monument that absolutely looks like an Icelandic (or Skandinavian for that matter) church. This monument was officially opened in 1975 to commemorate the declaration of Afrikaans as an official language seperate from Dutch. The monument consists of tapering obeliks structures of different heights and widths. They symbolize fractional contribution of other languages to Afrikaans and the relationship between them.
This was overall a very special day full of discoveries, beautiful views and history integrated in nature. I have gratitude towards a lovely special person for taking me to these places and showing me around on that day.
Cheers
Harita Kurdu
Very interesting monument. Looks very modern. And who doesn't like a good you-pick-em? Fun that they have so many different fruits to pick at different times.
I can't wait for the strawberry season <3
Is whole day of picking fruits expensive? Do you live in Africa?
Yes I do, the entrance was 20 Rands (less than 2 usd I think) @route-m-d
Love the old farmsteads down in the Cape region, each will have a tale to tell, fruit picking is great fun meeting people who love the outdoors.
Lavender flowers looked in abundance as well, hope they keep bee hives on the farm.
The bug hotel makes for a change, never seen one of those before, thanks for the travel log and sharing @haritakurdu
Actually, there was a section of the garden full of bee-hives, it freaked me out of course!
Personally I don't mind bees around, take objection to flies and mosquito.
Indeed, that sculpture looks like it's straight out of Iceland. Very cool
Congratulations! Your high-quality travel content was selected by @travelfeed curator @for91days and earned you a partial upvote. We love your hard work and hope to encourage you to continue to publish strong travel-related content.
Thank you for being part of the TravelFeed community!
Learn more about our travel project on Steemit by clicking on the banner above and join our community on Discord.
@haritakurdu Another great post my friend and the Cape certainly has many surprises in store for those that love history and travel! Blessings!
Dear @haritakurdu,
Your story attracted our attention and we would like to introduce our tag #archisteem that could provide you with some extra support. For your information, we are currently running the project – 1001 Places to Remember. Your content is a fit for the project and could be qualified for the 10 Steem reward biweekly contest.
It would be great if we can have this story of yours included in the project. If you agree, please reply to us.
Do drop by and take a look :) Hope to see you around soon.
Stay tuned and Steem on!
@archisteem and team
Well, I know which hotel I don't want to stay at - the Bug Hotel :D The trees look cool, I'd say they remind me a little bit of the trees in the very first Sonic the Hedgehog on the Game Gear, the Green Hill levels maybe?
That monument has a pretty unique structure to it as well, I was wowed just looking at the pictures so can only imagine it must have been more "wowey" when you were there!
It was definitely very wovey, you can even go underneath the pointy structure and see the interior, which looks like the eye of a tornado.
I don't know about the game you mentioned hahaha
That does sound pretty cool but I cannot believe you have heard of Super Mario but not Sonic the Hedgehog 😮 amazing platform arcade game. It was Sega's competitor to Nintendo. Yes I spent a lot of my youth on computer games 😂
Posted using Partiko Android