The first part of my trip to South Africa was spent exploring Cape Town. My friend Robynne, who now lives in London, is from there and was back visiting her parents before the wedding and my friend Nicara, just moved back to Durban. We decided to meet in Cape Town and spend six nights exploring the city and the surrounding area.
Since they had already done many of the typical tourist activities before, they became my local guides, showing me some of the best things to do in Cape Town while I experienced the city for the first time.
Cape Town as a City
Cape Town sits at the southwestern tip of South Africa, wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and Table Mountain. It’s about as far south as you can go on the continent before you hit the ocean. It has a population of about five million and a few thousand penguins.
One thing that stood out was how decentralized the city feels. It’s spread across a series of business, commercial and residential nodes. Because of this layout, and the lack of a robust public transportation system, having a car is necessary if you want to fully explore the area. It also isn’t a particularly walkable city.
At the same time, Cape Town still feels deeply shaped by the legacy of apartheid. Even as a visitor, the divisions are apparent and hard to ignore, especially in the downtown area. Most of the people enjoying the Easter break and leisure time were white, while the hotel staff and service workers were black.
The laws may have changed but much of the underlying structure remains. Who owns things, who serves others, who gets to be a tourist in their own city and country. Thirty years out and the architecture of that system is still prevalent.
Cape Town Highlights
1.Seeing Friends
One of the best parts about traveling is reconnecting with friends you haven’t seen in a while, especially when you’re seeing them in their home country.
There’s a level comfort that comes with old friendships that is difficult to find elsewhere. In everyday life, especially at work, we balance professionalism with personality. Even when meeting new people socially, there’s often a period of trying to figure each other out before fully relaxing around them.
With close friends, that barrier disappears. Traveling with Nicara and Robynne and reconnecting after years apart was one of the highlights.
2.The Penguins
It was my first time seeing penguins outside of a zoo and one of the few places you can see them wandering along the beach and shore. There’s something surreal about seeing penguins in warm weather instead of surrounded by snow and ice.
Unfortunately, the colony is threatened. Fewer than 10,000 of the penguins remain and I believe the Cape Town one is under 2,000.
The penguins are mainly concentrated around a beach called Boulder’s Gate, appropriately named because of the large rock formations near the beach. It was hatching or near hatching season so many of the penguins were sitting on their eggs.
There’s three parts to the area. The first is a free boardwalk part slightly removed from the beach that winds through the trees near the nesting and resting grounds. Here they rested in the shade, or in their small jug-like covered area. They were either resting, walking about, sitting in the sun or sitting on their eggs. It was amazing to see.
The second part is the paid boardwalk that leads down toward the beach. This is where a majority of the penguins gather. Some stood on rocks near the water while others rested directly on the sand. Every so often a penguin would leap into the ocean or emerge from the waves and awkwardly waddle back onto the shore.
The third part is the beach itself. When we first arrived, we skipped it because of how crowded it was. We could hear the cacophony of the crowd as we walked the boardwalk. It was also high tide and the beach was reduced to a sliver.
After leaving the paid boardwalk area, we made our way back toward the beach as the sun was beginning to set. By then, almost everybody had left. It was the three us and maybe a couple of other people. At first there were no penguins around, but slowly, one at a time, they began appearing from seemingly nowhere.
I noticed down the beach that some people emerged from behind a rock. I decided to investigate. Climbing under and over a few rocks, I soon found myself alone beneath the colors of the sunset. As I rounded another large boulder, I came across a small group of penguins standing quietly along the shore.
One emerged from the water and waddled directly toward me. For a moment, nothing else mattered. It was just me and the penguins.
3.Getting Attacked by a Baboon & Cape of Good Hope
Speaking of unforgettable experiences, another one was getting attacked by a baboon at the Cape of Good Hope.
Cape of Good Hope is the southernmost part of the Cape Town peninsula and is a national park. Earlier that day we had driven out to the end to see the lighthouse, before deciding to explore some of the quitter beaches nearby.
An important part of the story is that our rental car was manual. Not only was it manual, but South Africans drive on the opposite side of the road compared to the U.S. Robynne had driven the entire trip up until that point, but because we were inside the park and there were very few cars around, I wanted to see if I could still drive manual.
I had learned years earlier in Spain, but had barely driven on since, and definitely never from the opposite side of the car.
Driving the car went fine. I drove for maybe ten minutes down to the beach and the parking area. From there it was a long walk down a sand dune toward the ocean.
Nicara stayed behind in the car while Robynne and I went down to the beach. As we were walking back across the parking lot, a large baboon suddenly started sprinted toward us on all fours.
Immediately all the possibilities about what to do ran through my mind. We were standing there in bathing suits with nothing except backpacks. I couldn’t come up with many options.
I stepped behind Robynne, lady’s first after all. Also, she’s South African, I knew that she knew how to handle a baboon better than I could.
Earlier she had mentioned how baboons don’t like women. For some reason, it did go toward her, so she took her backpack off and held it in front of her. It grabbed it and immediately lost interest in us.
She said, “Joe yell at it”. Apparently, baboons are intimated by deeper male voices.
So I did.
The baboon stopped going through the backpack, looked directly at me and made a move in my direction.
I didn’t yell again.
We stood there unsure of what to do, while Nicara watched from inside the car about a hundred feet away. Eventually I ran back to the car, jumped into the driver’s seat, reversed without stalling and drove toward the baboon (without stalling) in an attempt to scare it away.
It did nothing.
Instead, it casually picked up the backpack and carried it five feet away up a small dune next to the asphalt parking lot.
The three of us sat in the car and watched as it methodically searched through Robynne’s backpack. It ignored her phone and wallet, ate some paracetamol, briefly examined the tampons and then discovered a chocolate egg her parents had given us when we first arrived in Cape Town.
I tried throwing a water bottle at it but completely missed, hitting the backpack instead. The baboon remained entirely unfazed.
Eventually a tourist family stopped to watch what was happening from what they thought was a safe distance. For some reason, the baboon suddenly abandoned the backpack and charged directly at them instead. It attacked the son and the son fell yelling to the ground as it tried to shake it off of him.
We jumped out of the car, quickly grabbed her stuff and jumped back into the car just as the baboon started running toward us again.
I flawlessly drove away without a single stall. As we passed the family, we rolled down the window and asked if they were okay. The dad asked, “is it dangerous?”
Yes, obviously…
I continued driving, out of the park and into town for lunch. Safely away from the baboon, everything recovered and a slightly torn backpack.
4.Wine Tour
When living in Korea I spent years hearing from my South African friends about how good the wine was there. Despite barely drinking, doing a wine tour ended up being my idea.
We booked a full-day wine tour from GetYourGuide. It included the drive there and back and a visit to three estates in three wine regions: Paarl, Franschoek and Stellenbosch and fifteen wines with pairings. Part of the appeal of the tour was to see more of the country outside of Cape Town.
Our first tasting started at 10:40 in the morning and I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the day. I have barely had more than a drink or two at a time over the past six years. Somehow, I made it through and honestly held up better than some of the older folk on the trip who were asleep on the bus.
The tour itself was excellent. We met a lot of great people, including two Kenyans we later met for dinner and ended up spending the next evening with as well. The weather was perfect, the scenery was beautiful and the food parings were great. I didn’t particularly enjoy the wine, but the experience itself was fantastic.
My only criticism was that while the guide was knowledgeable, funny and engaging, speaking constantly about the history of the wineries and the surrounding towns, there was almost no mention of colonialism.
The history was presented in a romantic fashion. Dutch or English settlers arrived, established vineyards in the seventeenth century and built what eventually became some of the oldest wineries in South Africa.
But that history came at someone else’s expense.
Without Dutch colonialization, the formalized system of apartheid likely would not have emerged in the same way it later did. I am not saying the entire tour needed to become a lecture on colonialism, but it felt strange to discuss these estates and history without acknowledging the broader history that shaped them.
5.Chapmans Peak Drive
Chapmans Peak drive was the first thing we did on our first full day in Cape Town. It runs along the Atlantic side of the Peninsula with cliffs on one side and the ocean on the other.
As we drove south we stopped at viewpoints along the way. Eventually we made our way to Noordhoek beach, a long, flat, expanse of sand with hardly any people on it. We spent a couple of hours there, attempted to go into the freezing Atlantic Ocean a couple of times and then made our way back along the drive to Cape Town.
On the way back we stopped at Clifton beach. Wildly different than Noordhoek and a lot more crowded, it consists of four beaches broken up by big granite rocks. We stayed there until sunset as then made our way back to the hotel.
Later that evening I had my first Aperol Spritz. I don’t think I’ll have another one.
6.Table Mountain Hike
If you visit Cape Town, you have to experience Table Mountain. Even if you do not want to hike it, taking the cable car to the top is worth it for the views alone.
Robynne and I decided to hike it early one morning. Originally, we wanted to do one of the longer routes that passes swimming spots and covers more of the mountain, but we also planned to visit Bo Kaap afterward and did not have enough time.
Instead, we chose Platteklip Gorge, the shortest and most direct route to the summit.
The hike is essentially a giant natural stairmaster. It goes straight up the mountain through what feels like an endless series of uneven stone steps. My legs were burning almost immediately.
Most guides estimate the hike takes between two and three hours, but we finished it in under ninety minutes without pushing too hard.
Once at the top, the mountain opens into a wide and flat plateau. We had perfect weather that morning, with clear views stretching across Cape Town, the coastline, and the surrounding mountains.
Nicara planned to meet us at the top using the cable car, but the wait time was over two hours because of the Easter holiday crowds. Apparently, the entire country had decided to visit Table Mountain that week.
7.Zietz MOCCA Museum
We were supposed to go to Robben Island one morning but it was canceled for whatever reason. The island is especially important because it’s where Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen years. Unfortunately, it happened on our last full day in Cape Town, so we didn’t have another opportunity to go.
Instead, we spent the day fully exploring the Zietz MOCCA museum.
Designed by Heatherwick Studio, the same firm behind Little Island and the Vessel in New York City, the museum was built inside a former grain silo complex that had sat abandoned since 2001.
Rather than demolishing the structure, the architects carved gallery spaces directly into the original concrete tubes, transforming the industrial skeleton into more than eighty exhibition spaces spread across nine floors.
It is now the largest contemporary art museum dedicated to African art in the world.
The permanent collection focuses heavily on themes of migration, memory, identity, and visibility. Those themes are especially powerful considering how often African artists and perspectives have historically been excluded from major global institutions.
Artists such as Zanele Muholi, Kudzanai Chiurai, and Athi Patra Ruga all have work represented there. Powerful works rooted in history and layered with meaning.
The entire museum operates from the premise, African stories told by African artists on their own terms.
After six days in Cape Town, it is easy to understand why it is so popular. From hiking Table Mountain and driving Chapman’s Peak to seeing penguins at Boulders Beach and exploring the wine regions around Stellenbosch, there is an abundance of things to do.
Such a special time! Loved every minute.