Cape Town accommodations

Dave and I started looking for places to stay for our big trips this year. The first challenge was getting affordable plane tickets to Buenos Aries, our fist destination, in December for the Christmas holiday. We originally wanted to leave on December the 23rd and come back on the 4th. We looked at a United flight which is direct from Washington Dulles but the price was close to 3k for a coach class ticket. That is way out of our price range. So I stated looking at alternative offerings from other airlines in the star alliance (we like our points)

We found Air Canada out of Toronto for about 1k each. It would be a trip from Washington National to Toronto to Buenos Aires. The problem is we were not sure we wanted to go so we procrastinated.

We shouldn’t have done that. The prices went up to close to what united was charging for those dates. We made up our minds to stay at home and see what was being offered by way of an esaver the week before Christmas.

But I wouldn’t let it die and one day decided to look around some more.

I found that if you left on the 25th and came back on the 5th the price dropped from $2,900.00 to $947.00 each. I called Dave and told him about it. We got the tickets within thirty minutes of that conversation. Which is good because I looked again after that and the price had gone up again to $2,900.00 for those dates too.

So now we have the tickets to Buenos Aires but no place to stay. This mirrored the situation we were in for Cape Town South Africa for March. I got us free tickets on points, including my sister coming out of Charlotte NC but we didn’t have a place to stay.

Dave and I decided to spend the weekend looking for places to stay, my job was Cape Town and his was Buenos Aires.

Let me tell you, this is not an easy or fast job. There are way too many places to look at on the internet.

I looked and looked and looked and sent off inquiries to a bunch of places but was getting discouraged. You see we need a place for the whole month. We have a staggered schedule of Dave and his mom, then Dave and my sister, then Dave my sister and me and then Dave and me with maybe some friends coming to stay from Brazil and the UK. We were very fortunate in the last couple of visits to get places to stay in the $100 to $150 a day range.

I wasn’t finding anything like that this time, it was all $300 to $ 500 a day for something we wanted to stay in and $200 a day for something we didn’t want to stay in on the bad side of town. I finally asked someone about a place in Bantry Bay. It was rented but they had another suggestion if I didn’t mind looking at it, and they offered a monthly rate.

We looked at it and it looked interesting. It was a three bedroom (we were looking at two bedrooms) with a roof deck and it was in the right location. Here is the link to the description.

Now here is the good part, we were offered it for the whole month for 22, 500 Rand, or about 3k or about $98 a night. Now what you have to know is that it normally rents for three times that even in the slow season so I wasn’t sure what was going on. Seems that the girl mistook the monthly rate paid if you stay for a year with the monthly rate if you only stay for a month and she quoted us the yearly/monthly rate by mistake. And they are standing by the mistake!! We couldn’t be happier. It was looking like lodging was going to cost around 7k to 8k for something we wanted to stay in. Oh happy days.

So now we’re still looking for a place to stay Christmas in Buenos Aires. Dave has a few leads and we are just waiting to hear back from them. I think we've narrowed it down to two in the same building.

Somewhere in all this we have a life with work and friends happening too. Never a dull moment in our lives.

Playa Del Carmen

Rob over Christmas “We need to go to Playa Del Carmen”

Me, calling his bluff “Ok, how about over 4th of July”

Rob, calling my bluff “Fabulous! I’ll set it up”

Me in my mind “ Oh f*ck, now we really have to go”

Rob and Mikko have been telling us for years how great Playa was (We’ll call it Playa from now on to shorten things even if it does just mean beach in Spanish) for years. They have gone for New Years and other times of the year. We’ve done places like Rio over New Years. So finally we were nailed down on a time to go.

It was one of the best times we’ve had. And that was a huge surprise.

For some reason Dave and I had this notion that Mexico was not a destination that we wanted to visit. There are more exotic places in the world that we wanted to go to but a few things happened along the way over the last year that changed that thought.

The dollar SUCKS against most currencies!!

Fuel prices have driven plane tickets to the point of being ridiculous. I checked a ticket to CLT from DCA and it was $800. That’s an hour trip!!

So both of those reasons made going to Mexico much more attractive. We used points to get the plane tickets and the peso is still a good value so the room was cheap and everything else was cheapish too even though we were in tourist central.

The days consisted of getting up at 11ish and going to the beach to lounge around at the most amazing beach club until about 6 drinking bear and eating lunch. We would then go back and take a little nap before heading to dinner at around 9pm. Then it was time to go to the local gay bar called Playa 69. Funny great name I think. And we would stay there until the wee hours of the night go home and then do it again.

This happened every day except Monday when Playa 69 was closed so this forced us to get some sleep that night. I also went deep sea fishing on Thursday so I had a little bit of an early night on Wednesday because I had to be up and out of the house for the boat at around 7am.

This was pretty much the vacation and we enjoyed it greatly.

I especially liked the fishing even though I feed the fish coffee three times while we were on the very small boat out on the very rough sea. Ughhh!!!! Luckily I didn’t eat any solid food that morning. Still we caught 7 fish between the 8 of us, which was 7 more than what some of the other boats caught. We got a sail fish which I’ve never seen caught before. It was at least 4 feet long but we let it go (Bill fish are endangered) and we also caught a Mahi Mahi that was just as big. I caught a mackerel and a barracuda. When we caught the Mahi Mahi two other boats come over to see us pull it in and when we got to the beach 20 people showed up to look at it. Seems no one had caught a Mahi that big in six months. Everyone was so envious. I was so proud of my friends and their catches.

Also, as soon as I put my feet back on the ground my sea sickness went away. What a relief. I don’t remember feeling that bad and I hate throwing up.

That night we took half of the Mahi Mahi and a Barracuda back to the flat and proceeded to have a dinner party for 14 with plenty of fish. All in all a very good day.

Me to Rob “We are soooo coming back”

Rob to me “We knew you would”

So, that was our trip to Playa Del Carmen. I left out anything that was R rated or worse. Those are stories for in person.