Table Mountain, Cape Point & Penguins Full-Day Tour, Cape Town

Bo-Kaap

The day begins on the slopes of Signal Hill in Bo-Kaap, the old quarter where the descendants of people brought to the Cape from South-East Asia built a community around their mosques. Its steep cobbled streets are lined with flat-fronted houses painted lime green, pink, turquoise and yellow, and the Auwal Mosque on Dorp Street, dating from the 1790s, is the oldest in South Africa. The area is quiet in the early morning, which is the best time to photograph it.

We spend about twenty-five minutes here, enough for a short stroll and for our guide to explain the Cape Malay heritage that gave the city its distinctive cooking and its spring carnival. Bo-Kaap is also where many visitors look for halal food in Cape Town, and the corner shops and bakeries along Wale Street are good places to come back to later in your stay.

Table Mountain by cable car

From Bo-Kaap it is a short drive up to the lower cableway station on Tafelberg Road. The rotating cable car takes about five minutes to climb to the summit plateau, just over a thousand metres above the city, turning a full circle on the way so everyone sees the cliff, the City Bowl and the Atlantic. The tour allows about an hour on top for the viewpoint paths, the dassies on the rocks and the view south along the peninsula to where you will be in the afternoon.

The cable car ticket is not included; we recommend buying a morning ticket online before your tour date to skip the queue, and our guide helps with the timing. The cableway closes in strong wind or thick cloud, and when that happens the tour continues with the rest of the day and, where possible, a viewpoint stop on the mountain's lower slopes instead. Going up first thing is deliberate: mornings are usually the calmest and clearest.

Camps Bay, Hout Bay and Chapman's Peak Drive

Leaving the mountain, we drive down to the Atlantic Seaboard and along Victoria Road past the beach and palm-lined front of Camps Bay, the hidden cove of Llandudno and into Hout Bay, a fishing village between the mountains and the sea. Here there is a chance to join an optional short boat trip out to the seal colony on Duiker Island when time and sea conditions allow.

Then comes Chapman's Peak Drive, nine kilometres of road blasted into the cliff between Hout Bay and Noordhoek with the ocean directly below; the toll is included and we stop at a viewpoint for photographs. At the southern end lies Noordhoek, once farmland that supplied the ships at Simon's Town, with a long white beach. A quick stop at an ostrich farm follows, where you see the world's largest bird up close and learn how these flightless birds are raised.

Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park is a wild headland of fynbos, cliffs and beaches at the tip of the peninsula, where the cold Atlantic and the warmer False Bay waters meet offshore. We stop at the Cape of Good Hope sign, the most south-western point of Africa, and then at Cape Point itself, where a path and the optional funicular climb to the old lighthouse of 1859 for a view over the whole reserve and the ocean beyond.

The park entrance fee and the funicular are paid at the gate and are not included in the tour. Allow about an hour and a quarter for both stops. Ostriches, bontebok, eland and baboons live in the reserve; keep your distance from the baboons and never feed them. For many guests this is the high point of any Cape Point day tour from Cape Town, so bring a windproof layer, as the point is exposed to the wind.

Boulders Beach penguins

Back on the False Bay side, Boulders Beach near Simon's Town shelters a colony of African penguins that has lived among its granite boulders since the early 1980s. Boardwalks lead from the entrance through the coastal bush to viewing platforms above the beach, where the birds nest in burrows under the bushes, stand about in groups and shuffle down to the water a few metres from you. It is a protected area within the national park and a conservation fee is paid at the entrance.

The tour spends about forty-five minutes here. Penguins are present all year, with chicks most visible in the breeding season; sightings of wild animals are never guaranteed, but at Boulders the colony is resident and reliably seen. Is Boulders Beach worth visiting with children? It is usually their favourite stop of the day.

Simon's Town and Muizenberg

Simon's Town, a naval harbour town with Victorian buildings along its main street and the South African Navy still based in its docks, is where we stop for about an hour of free time. Lunch is at your own expense, with seafood restaurants on the harbour and cafés in the historic centre; our guide points you to the options.

On the way back we stop above Muizenberg for a view of its long beach and the row of brightly painted Victorian bathing huts that appear on so many Cape Town postcards; the gentle waves here make it the city's surfing school beach, and shark spotters watch the water from the mountainside. From Muizenberg it is about an hour and a half back to your accommodation, arriving in the early evening after a ten-hour day.