Is Cape Town safe for a family holiday? An honest answer.

People usually ask this apologetically, as though it were rude. It is a completely reasonable question and it deserves a real answer rather than a reassuring one.

Cape Town has a high violent crime rate. Nobody here disputes it and no amount of glossy photography changes it. What the headline number does not tell you is where that crime happens and to whom, and that is the part worth knowing before you decide anything.

The risk is not spread evenly

The overwhelming majority of violent crime in this city happens in a handful of areas on the Cape Flats, largely between people who know each other, and largely in communities no visitor has any reason to be in. The parts of the city a guest actually spends time in, the City Bowl, the Atlantic Seaboard, Constantia, Simon's Town, the peninsula, carry a risk profile a great deal closer to a European city than to the number in the news.

That is not an argument for complacency. It is an argument for being precise about what you are actually managing.

What tends to happen to visitors

The incidents that affect tourists here cluster tightly, and almost all of them involve a hire car:

• Stopping at an unfamiliar junction with a phone visible while working out where to go.
• Leaving bags in a parked car at a viewpoint, a trailhead or a beach car park.
• Coming off the M5 or the N2 at the wrong exit and ending up somewhere you did not intend to be.
• Walking back to a hotel after dinner along a road that looked fine in daylight.
• Being jet-lagged, distracted and obviously new, in a car park, on day one.

These are not random events. They are a narrow and fairly predictable set of circumstances.

What being driven changes

You are not reading a map at a junction. Your bags are never in an unattended car. You are not parking at a trailhead, because you get dropped at one end of the walk and collected at the other. And the ordinary judgements that are hard in a city you do not know, which beach, which road, which street after dark, are being made by somebody who lives here.

That is most of it. Unglamorous, and effective.

What we think is genuinely worth planning for

The water. The Atlantic side runs about twelve degrees and the currents on both coasts are strong. Swim where the locals swim, and use the patrolled beaches. False Bay is four to six degrees warmer if anyone actually wants to get in.

The sun. The UV index here in January is higher than most British visitors have ever experienced. Hats, and the middle of the day indoors.

The wind. The south-easter from November to February is stronger than people expect. It shuts the cableway, cancels boats and makes some beaches unusable, and it is the main reason our itineraries get reordered day to day.

The mountain. Table Mountain generates its own weather and people get caught out on it every year, almost always walking unguided on a path that stopped being a path. Our walks go with a qualified mountain guide.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you Cape Town is as safe as Zurich, because it is not. What we will tell you is that between the two of us, across twenty-seven years of guiding here, the incidents we have had to manage are a broken wrist on a hiking trail, a lost passport, one stomach bug and a great deal of sunburn.

If you are still uncertain after reading this, put it in your enquiry. We would much rather have the conversation now than have you spend the flight wondering.