Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula, to the point

Few cities have a setting like Cape Town's. It spreads around the shore of Table Bay and up the slopes of Table Mountain, a great flat-topped block of sandstone that rises over a thousand metres straight behind the city centre, often draped in a white cloud that Capetonians call the tablecloth. To one side stand Devil's Peak and Lion's Head, to the other the Twelve Apostles, a line of buttresses running down the Atlantic coast. And beyond the city, the Cape Peninsula runs south for some fifty kilometres to Cape Point, a ridge of mountains between two seas.

The city

Cape Town was founded in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company as a station where its ships could take on fresh food and water on the long voyage to Asia. It is the oldest city in South Africa, and its history is visible everywhere: in the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest surviving colonial building in the country; in the Company's Garden, the descendant of the vegetable garden that supplied the ships; in the brightly painted houses of the Bo-Kaap, the district on the slopes of Signal Hill where the descendants of slaves and political exiles brought from South-East Asia made their home.

The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, on the old harbour, is the city's busiest area, and from it boats cross to Robben Island, a few miles out in Table Bay. For centuries it was a place of banishment, and under apartheid it was a maximum-security prison where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in jail. It is now a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and many of its guides are former prisoners.

Table Mountain

The mountain is the city's emblem, and on a clear day the cable car to the top is the first thing most visitors do. The cars rotate as they climb, so that everyone gets the view, and the summit plateau has paths among its rocks and its unique plants, part of the fynbos, the shrubland of the Cape that is one of the richest plant kingdoms on earth. The views take in the whole city, the bay, Robben Island and the peninsula stretching away to the south.

The weather can change quickly. When the tablecloth comes down, the cable car stops and the mountain disappears, so it is worth going up on the first clear day rather than waiting.

Down the peninsula

The drive around the Cape Peninsula is one of the great days out in South Africa. It runs down the Atlantic side past the beaches of Camps Bay and Clifton, and along Chapman's Peak Drive, a road cut into the cliffs above the sea with spectacular views back to Hout Bay.

On the False Bay side, Simon's Town is an old naval base with Victorian buildings along its main street, and just beyond it is Boulders Beach, where a colony of African penguins nests among the granite boulders. They can be watched from boardwalks a few metres away, waddling to and from the sea.

At the tip of the peninsula, Cape Point is a high rocky headland with an old lighthouse, and nearby is the Cape of Good Hope itself, named by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. It is not, despite what many people think, the southernmost point of Africa, which is Cape Agulhas, further east, nor quite the place where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet. But it feels like the end of the continent, and the views from the point, with the ocean crashing on the rocks far below, live up to the name.

The tours

Just You's Experience South Africa, thirteen nights for solo travellers, starts in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula, then travels along the Garden Route through Oudtshoorn and Knysna to Port Elizabeth, and in the north visits Pretoria, the Panorama Route, Kruger National Park and Johannesburg.

Travelsphere's Ultimate South Africa with Victoria Falls Add-on, twenty-one nights, covers similar ground over three weeks, with Cape Town and the peninsula, Stellenbosch, Oudtshoorn, Knysna, Gqeberha, the battlefields of KwaZulu-Natal and Kruger, ending at Victoria Falls.

Cape Town has a Mediterranean climate, with warm, dry summers from November to March and cool, wet winters. Summer is the busiest season, and it brings the south-easterly wind, the Cape Doctor, which can blow hard for days. Spring, from September to November, is quieter, and the wild flowers are out.