It's a 90-minute drive outside Cape Town and into the Cape Winelands where pleasant towns like Franschhoek and Stellenbosch are worthy of an afternoon meander. It's here you'll find overtly posh hotels like Delaire Graff, the bespoke glamour of La Residence and Babylonstoren - an agrarian wonderland that sits among the Drakenstein Valley and offers a bohemian farm hotel unlike anyplace in the world.
A security detail mans the main entrance with a wave, leading down a series of long gravel roads that intersect the property's wine vineyards leading to a farm hotel that's home to a botanical café, artisan spa, farm-to-table restaurant and gourmet shop with bakery and butcher. Cape Dutch farm buildings that date back to 1690 dot the landscape with crowing roosters and partridge families meandering along the path to your lofty-suites with fully equipped kitchens that arrive with their own produce from the on-site gardens. And it is the gardens that make Babylonstoren the travel experience that it is, consisting of 8 acres that for centuries supplied trader ships with fruits and vegetables at the halfway port between Europe and Asia.
Today, the individual's experience of walking through the endless, impeccably manicured gardens is akin to what the King of France likely felt walking the gardens of Versailles in summer’s moonlight or Hugh Conway's Shangri-La - but an edible version. 20-foot iron cornucopias erupt with peaches that beg to be picked, plums poetically purple and rows of lettuce greens that are the feast each day at its Babel restaurant. To stay even a single night at Babylonstoren is to fall in love with food and nature all over again, ideally capped off with a midnight walk through the fragrant summer gardens as the nightingales serenade your path.
