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.