The first weekend of May was the annual olive festival in Riebeek Kasteel & Riebeek West. While my mom and I have been to the Riebeek Valley a few times, we’d been just once before to the olive fest and were keen to check it out again, so we went up on Sunday May 6.

The traffic was pretty bad in Malmesbury due to multiple roadworks and stop/gos and it was pretty heavy entering Riebeek Kasteel too, but, doing things in reverse order, we drove straight through to the end of Riebeek West to start our trawling from the other side.

This was not a random decision – on our last visit to the festival a few years ago, we had potjie for lunch at Pulpit Rock and it had been so good we decided to start there this time around.

Pulpit Rock also offered free tractor rides, which took a scenic route through vineyards and past assorted game, including kudu, gemsbok and eland. Definitely something planned with kids in mind – there were plenty on the tractor with us and they seemed to really enjoy it.

We then made our way back to Riebeek Kasteel to investigate the market stalls, which featured everything from home-made lemonade to Persian rugs. Pretty bizarre but fun nonetheless.

The market was huge and spanned pretty much the whole town, or at least, the bulk of the main drag. The (incredibly nerdy) highlight for me was seeing a passion flower growing on a granadilla tree – I haven’t seen one in years and got ridiculously excited about it, it totally made my weekend.

I noted with a pinch of regret that there was a lot of really amazing-looking food everywhere; probably just as well that we had a big lunch though, otherwise we might’ve been driven mad attempting to choose from the wide variety on sale.  Ironically we didn’t even taste a single olive all day.

We took the scenic way home, stopping to investigate some strange objects on the side of the road in Malmesbury (which turned out to be rotting melons), a herd of cows near Abbotsdale Station, and to buy something to drink in the one horse town of Kalbaskraal.

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The Riebeek Valley is well-worth a visit, both during olive season and any other time.
The Olive Festival runs annually in early May; for more info on the region, click here.