April 2022 – Wanderwiles

Qatar Airways Qsuites: 26+ hours of luxury flying

The last hurrah of my big birthday trip was a two-flight return journey from Cape Town to Dallas via Doha on Qatar Airways Qsuites. I’d been wanting try Qsuites for awhile, but it just never worked into our plans. With American Airlines offering this pair of flights on partner Qatar Airways for a super-reasonable 70,000 miles, now was the time!

While the route might see ridiculously out-of-the-way on first glance, it was actually perfect and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. The first flight was overnight, Cape Town to Doha, so I chose two interior seats (Qsuites are in a 1-2-1 configuration) so that David and I could merge our seat cubicles. We shared dinner, then had our seats reconfigured to have a private double bed in the sky. We loved it! read more

South Africa finale: A gorgeous hotel in a former Constantia vineyard

Although the room we stayed in listed online at over $700/night, our stay at The Cellars-Hohenort was completely free thanks to Hyatt credit card “annual” certificates which David had accumulated over the pandemic as Hyatt and other hotel chains extended the validity of such certificates during the worldwide shut-down. (We used my three certificates for our stay at The Marine Hermanus.) The Cellars-Hohenort is part of the Liz McGrath collection of three 5-star hotels which, along with The Marine Hermanus, had just come under the Hyatt umbrella. We couldn’t have been happier with this use of the certificates! read more

An Afrikaner ostrich farm

Skeiding ostriches were as curious about us as we were about them.

I’m behind on blogging having been distracted by the holidays and then the heartbreaking last weeks with my beloved, nearly 18-year old dog, so am finishing up the end of our South Africa trip while on a transAtlantic cruise from Florida back to Europe. I’ll keep it brief, but I hated to let two favorite South African stays (and a pair of awesome Qatar Airways Qsuites flights home) go unreported.

Looking for something different after our time driving South Africa’s Garden Route, I was intrigued to find Skeiding Guest Farm, billed as a working ostrich farm. How fun!) Turning inland from the Garden Route, the drive to Skeiding took us through dramatic mountain passes into the Little Karoo, a rugged high plains area. We stopped for lunch at a funky little roadside café and gift shop called Bella de Karoo and descended back through the mountains to the ostrich farm at the end of some miles of unpaved road. (Bella de Karoo apparently has guest rooms elsewhere, but we didn’t check those out.) read more