· 2 minute read
The peninsula day, in the right order
Almost every visitor drives the Cape Peninsula the same way round, at the same time, and meets every coach in the Western Cape at Cape Point. There is no reason to, and the day is transformed by running it backwards.
By Angie Bradley, Lead guide, Cape Town and the Winelands
Twenty years of doing this and the single most useful thing I know about the peninsula is which direction to drive it.
The standard loop goes anti-clockwise. Out of the city down the Atlantic seaboard, over Chapman's Peak, into the reserve, Cape Point around one o'clock, then back up the False Bay side to the penguins in the late afternoon. Every guidebook says it and almost every operator runs it, which means at one o'clock you are queuing for the funicular behind four coaches, and at four o'clock you are on a penguin boardwalk with three hundred other people in flat, hard light.
Run it the other way
Leave the city at eight and go straight over the spine to Simon's Town on the False Bay side.
08:30, Boulders. The car park is a third full. The birds are heading out to feed and coming back through the surf, the light is behind you, and there is nobody in your photographs. Forty-five minutes here is plenty and it is the part your children will talk about.
10:00, into the reserve. The gate queue that is twenty minutes long at midday does not exist yet. Drive down through the fynbos with the eland and the ostriches and go straight to the Point.
10:30, Cape Point. Funicular up, twenty minutes at the lighthouse, and the cliffs to yourself. Walk down to Dias Beach afterwards if anyone has the legs, a wooden staircase to one of the more spectacular pieces of sand in the country.
12:30, lunch. Out of the reserve and up to Noordhoek or back to Kalk Bay harbour, depending on which side of the peninsula the wind is on.
14:30, Chapman's Peak. The light is better on that road in the afternoon than it is in the morning, and you are driving it with the drop on your seaward side, which is the right way round for the view and for the photographs.
16:00, Hout Bay or home. A late boat out to the seal colony if the swell allows, or straight back into the city with the whole Atlantic seaboard in the gold hour.
What changes it
The wind. A hard south-easter makes the Point unpleasant and Chapman's Peak occasionally closes. If it is blowing, we flip to the standard direction and take the exposed sections early.
Whale season. Between July and November there are southern rights in False Bay, and the coast road between Simon's Town and Kalk Bay is worth stopping on twice.
Small children. Cut the reserve short. Penguins, one beach, an early lunch and home by two beats a complete circuit that ends in a meltdown at Chapman's Peak.
What most people skip and should not
Kalk Bay harbour at about eleven in the morning, when the boats come in and sell what they caught off the quay. Noordhoek beach, which runs for eight kilometres and is usually empty. And the drive over Ou Kaapse Weg on the way home, which gives you the whole peninsula laid out behind you in one view.
