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Cape Town’s setting, on the Cape Peninsula, is simply stunning. A rugged tail of land washed by two oceans and dominated by iconic Table Mountain, the peninsula culminates dramatically at the sea-pounded cliffs of Cape Point. Generally, when locals talk about Cape Town, they mean the whole peninsula and to really get to grips with the city you need to spend time outdoors. Walking (or taking the cable car) up Table Mountain, catching the train down the False Bay coast to the 150km of sandy beaches that fringe the peninsula, or heading inland for hiking and picnicking in the many gardens and forests are the best ways for visitors to capture the essence of the city.
Though Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa, it is the least "African" city in the country, with black Africans making up less than a quarter of its population. The city’s unique feature is the Creolized coloured culture, which evolved from the interaction between Europeans and slaves brought from East Africa and the Far East. Mosques in the Bo-Kaap quarter, adjacent to the city centre, add spice to the colonial streetscape; Cape cuisine combines local ingredients with Eastern flavours; and Cape jazz is heard in the coloured townships of the Cape Flats as well as city-centre clubs. Over fifty percent of Capetonians are coloured, while about 27 percent are white, descended mainly from Dutch and British settlers. To complicate matters, language fails to line up conveniently with ethnicity, and Afrikaans, the city’s most widely spoken language, is used by a large proportion of coloureds and many whites. The city’s minority African population predominantly speak Xhosa, one of South Africa’s nine official African languages, but English is the effective lingua franca, and will get you by 99 percent of the time.
This ethnic diversity, along with high standards of accommodation, smart restaurants, slick clubs, laid-back cafés and a vibrant gay scene, makes visiting Cape Town a truly cosmopolitan experience. Most visitors only see the areas that were classified under apartheid as "white" and still remain relatively safe and salubrious: radiating out from the city centre, the largely affluent suburbs cling to the slopes of Table Mountain or perch at the edge of the peninsula’s two coasts. But for most Capetonians, living in the crowded townships and shantytowns on the Cape Flats, just getting on with their lives is set against the harsh reality of sky-high crime rates. These areas, to the east of the city, can be visited on guided tours, and if you really want to get under the skin of the African areas you can now enjoy the hospitality of staying in one of several B& Bs in a Xhosa home.
Table Mountain, frequently mantled by its "tablecloth" clouds, is the solid core of Cape Town, dividing the city into distinct zones, with public gardens, wilderness, forests, hiking routes, vineyards and desirable residential areas.
To its north lies the city centre, an attractive collage of Georgian, Cape Dutch and Victorian architecture, built on the foundations of the slave society that occupied it for the first half of its 350-year existence. Eyed by the Portuguese, Dutch and English in their turn, it became the place where Europe, Asia and Africa met. Today the centre is as much a cultural melting pot as ever, where coloured families from the Cape Flats do their shopping, young whites hang out in hip coffee bars, Muslims pray, street kids loiter on corners, buskers play to passing crowds and Africans converge from across the continent to hawk crafts.
A stone’s throw from the centre, the V&A Waterfront is Cape Town’s most popular spot for shopping, eating and drinking in a highly picturesque setting among the piers and quays of a working harbour, and is also the embarkation point for catamarans to Robben Island, the notorious site of Nelson Mandela’s incarceration. The rocky shore west of the Waterfront is occupied by the inner-city suburbs of Green Point and Sea Point, whose main drag is lined with some of the peninsula’s oldest and best restaurants, while their back streets are crammed with backpacker lodges, B&Bs and hotels. Equally good for accommodation, but leafy and upmarket in comparison, the City Bowl suburbs gaze down from the Table Mountain foothills across the central business district to the ships in Duncan Dock.
South from Sea Point, a coastal road traces the chilly Atlantic seaboard under the heights of the Twelve Apostles and past some of Cape Town’s most expensive suburbs and spectacular beaches at Clifton, Camps Bay and Bakoven. Further south, past Hout Bay, the road merges with the precipitous Chapman’s Peak Drive, ten dramatically snaking kilometres of Victorian engineering carved into the western cliffsides of the Table Mountain massif, high above the crashing waves. To the east, across Table Mountain, the exceptionally beautiful Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens creep up the lower slopes, as do the Constantia Winelands a little further south, while the middle-class southern suburbs stretch down the peninsula as far as Muizenberg. The Metrorail line, the only viable public transport down the length of the peninsula, cuts through these suburbs and continues along the False Bay seaboard, passing through villagey Kalk Bay, with its intact harbour and working fishing community, and Fish Hoek, which has the best bathing beach along the eastern side of the peninsula, before the final stop at the historic settlement of Simon’s Town.
Away from the city, an hour’s drive east of the Cape Flats into the Western Cape interior are the beautiful Winelands, with elegant examples of Cape Dutch architecture, wonderful wines and excellent restaurants. South of Cape Town you can take the picturesque coastal route, winding around massive sea-cliffs, to reach Hermanus, the largest settlement on the Whale Coast, and a fabulous spot for shore-based whale-watching.
