Cape Peninsula day tour from Cape Town

It was a typical winters days, cloudy and raining, felt just like home, apart from the fact it was warm. We were picked up from our hostel for a day trip down the Cape Peninsula to Cape Point and Cape of Good Hope, the most South Westerly point of the African continent, but not where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, that is Cape Agulhas.

Our first stop was in Cape Town, in the Bo-Kaap neighbourhood, known for its colourful houses and cobbled streets. From here we drove between Table Mountain and Lions Head to Camps Bay, this is where you see a lot of big expensive houses owned by politicians and celebrities. We didn’t meet any…

We headed south out of Cape Town down the west coast of the peninsula towards Hout Bay and southwards to Noordhoek. The coastal road was amazing, winding its way along the coast right on the edge of the hillside, with steep drop offs below you and high cliffs above you, the views were amazing, made even more so with the atmospheric cloudy skies!

The peninsula and Cape of Good Hope are part of the Table Mountain National Park (7,750 hectares), which incorporates Table Mountain and the Peninsula mountain chain from Signal Hill to Cape Point. Like any national park we have visited, there was a charge for entering.

We visited the first lighthouse, situated right on top of the point, its slightly shorter than a normal light house due to the height it was built at, but even then it was too high on the rock and was regularly engulfed by clouds, so they build a lower lighthouse, right on the tip of Cape Point, which is still used today.

After leaving Cape Point we drove to Boulders, where there is a sheltered cove amongst boulders as old as 540 million years, which is home to a colony of endangered African Penguins. The colony of about 3,000 is descendant of just two breeding pairs introduced in 1982. There are two board walks that take you round the bay to Foxy Beach where you can get a great view of the penguins.

On our way back to Cape Town we stopped for a wine tasting at Steenberg winery, a very good way to finish a great day!