Exploring Cape Town, South Africa

It was a short drive from Stellenbosch to Cape Town, arriving in the biggest city I have been in in quite a while, was like being transported home! We were staying at Ashanti Gardens, it was on the hillside on the way up towards Table Mountain. We had lunch on the deck with the most amazing clear sunny view of Table Mountain and Lions Head, what a welcome to Cape Town!

We walked and scrabbled up Lions Head to take in the sunset, the path spirals up, round and round Lions Head, then there is a short via ferrata type section with ladders, chains and staples, before a scrabble up a wide rocky ridge to the top. The views of the city and ocean were fantastic, and gave you some perspective to the actual size of Cape Town and its suburbs. As we descended Lions Head the light was starting to die, and we got a brilliant view of all the city lights on our way down, something I had forgotten about not having seen for a while. Due to the fading light we had to get our torches out and carefully pick our way down the rocks and paths.

It was a rough hour long ferry ride to Robben Island, I don’t normally get sea sick, but I felt a little bit green on this boat trip. The view back towards Cape Town is usually amazing, but it was a stormy cloudy day, so we couldn’t see anything. It was lovely and sunny on the island, but the mainland was still covered in cloud.

The island is a living museum with people living and working on the island, and until recently there was a school there, now the children have to go to school on the mainland. The island only covers an area of 5km sq. the lighthouse, which was converted to electricity in 1938, sits on top of Minto Hill, the highest point of the island at 18 meters.  In the past the island has been used as a leper colony and animal quarantine station, but is better known for its use as a prison for criminal and political prisoners. This is where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years in prison. The current South African president, Jacob Zuma also spent time as a political prisoner on Robben Island.

I felt pretty safe wandering around Cape Town, especially around the waterfront, which was a fantastic place to spend a day, watching street performers and boats coming and going. There was a delicious food market at the waterfront, where you could get all sorts of food, we got take away and sat outside in Nobel Square looking at the view and the four statues of Demond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and FW de Klerk. We found a great market in Green Market Square, it had coffee shops all round it and made for a lovely stop after some curio shopping!

I wanted to get out on the water again in better weather, so I took a sunset cruise on a huge sailboat called the “Spirit of Victoria”. It motored out of the harbour and then hoisted its sails and off we went, the wind was stronger than it looked and we had quite an exciting sail, much to the annoyance of some passengers. We weren’t far out of the harbour before we were joined by a whale, so we sat there for a while while it played not 200m from us. The view from the boat was stunning, the view we had missed the previous day, you could clearly see Table Mountain, Lions Head and Signal Hill, surrounded by the city.

We took the cable car up Table Mountain, during the trip the cabin rotates 360 degrees so that you get the complete view. There are a number of walks around the table top, we walked the couple of hours to Maclears Beacon, the highest point of Table Mountain. The walk took us across the central table, it was another lovely clear day and you could see all the way down the Cape Peninsula where we had been on our day trip. Our route back was along the Table Edge Path, which was at some points, literally on the cliff edge!

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!

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