Where Two Oceans Meet in Cape Town

The Mountain as Map

The India Venster route up Table Mountain is not the easy way. The cable car is the easy way — a rotating glass pod that lifts you from sea level to the summit in five air-conditioned minutes while you photograph the view through fingerprint-smudged windows. The India Venster is three hours of scrambling over sandstone, squeezing through rock chimneys, and following a path that disappears and reappears with the casual unreliability of a cat that may or may not come when you call it.

I chose the India Venster because a woman in my guesthouse told me it would change the way I saw the city. She was right. The climb begins in a forest of silver trees — leucadendrons, endemic to the Cape, with leaves that catch the morning light and flash like coins — and within twenty minutes the forest thins and the rock takes over and the city appears below you in a way that a cable car cannot replicate. Not all at once, but in stages. First the harbour. Then the stadium. Then the grid of the city bowl, white buildings against green gardens, the Company's Garden a dark rectangle at the centre. Then, as you climb higher and the angle changes, the Cape Flats stretching east toward the wine country and the townships spread in a vast, complicated patchwork that is beautiful and uncomfortable in equal measure.

At the summit, the wind hit. Table Mountain wind is not breeze. It is a force — the southeaster that the locals call the Cape Doctor because it blows the pollution out to sea, but which on the summit feels less like medicine and more like an argument. I braced against it and looked south. The Cape Peninsula stretched away below me, a long spine of mountain and coast ending at the Cape of Good Hope, where the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean collide in a line of white water visible even from this height. To the west, the Twelve Apostles range dropped into Camps Bay, the beach a white crescent between blue water and grey rock. To the east, the city — the harbour, the waterfront, the distant squares of Khayelitsha and Mitchell's Plain. Everything was visible. Everything was connected. The mountain is not just a landmark. It is the organizing principle of the city, the axis around which everything else arranges itself, and from the top you can see the whole arrangement — the wealth and the poverty, the beauty and the complication, the two oceans meeting at the continent's end.

The Harbour and the Seals

Kalk Bay is a fishing village that the city has not quite swallowed. It sits on the False Bay side of the peninsula, forty minutes from the centre by train, and it has the quality of a place that exists slightly outside of time — a single main street of second-hand bookshops, antique dealers, and cafes that serve coffee in mismatched cups, with a working harbour at one end where the fishing boats come in each morning and sell their catch on the quayside.

I arrived at seven on a Saturday. The boats were already in, their decks stacked with crates of snoek and yellowtail, and the fishermen were sorting the catch with the efficient disinterest of people who have done this ten thousand times. Cape fur seals hauled themselves onto the harbour wall and barked for scraps, their sleek bodies glistening, their eyes enormous and shameless. A pelican stood on a bollard with the dignified patience of a butler waiting to be noticed. A fisherman tossed a fish head into the water and six seals and three pelicans went for it simultaneously in a brief, spectacular explosion of spray and feathers and whiskers.

I bought a piece of snoek — a firm, oily fish that is to Cape Town what baguettes are to Paris — and ate it on the harbour wall with lemon and salt, watching the False Bay water change colour as the morning advanced. The Hottentots Holland mountains across the bay were purple in the early light, turning blue, turning grey-green as the sun climbed. A train rattled past on the tracks behind me, the Simon's Town line that runs along the coast like a scenic railway, each station more picturesque than the last. Kalk Bay exists in the gap between the sea and the mountain, and sitting on its harbour wall eating fresh fish with your hands while seals beg at your feet is one of those moments when travel fulfils a promise it does not always keep — the promise that somewhere, right now, ordinary life is happening in an extraordinary place, and all you have to do is show up.

The Sun on Stellenbosch

The Winelands begin twenty minutes from Cape Town's eastern edge, and the transition is jarring — one moment you are on a highway surrounded by townships and light industry, and the next you are driving through an oak-lined avenue toward a white-gabled Cape Dutch homestead with vineyards climbing the hillside behind it and the Simonsberg mountain presiding over everything with the patient grandeur of a very old, very wealthy relative.

Stellenbosch is the heart of it — a university town founded in 1679, lined with three-century-old oaks and whitewashed buildings and wine estates that have been producing since before the French Revolution. I visited three estates in an afternoon, which is ambitious but not, by Winelands standards, unusual. The first poured a pinotage — the uniquely South African grape, a cross between pinot noir and cinsault — that tasted of dark berries, earth, smoke, and something I can only describe as the warmth of the afternoon itself, as though the sun that had ripened the grapes had left a residue in the wine.

The second estate had a tasting room that looked out over a valley so green and symmetrical it appeared designed rather than grown, and a sommelier who described the chenin blanc as "opinionated" in a way that made me want to be the kind of person who uses the word opinionated about wine. The third had a restaurant where I ate springbok carpaccio and bobotie — the Cape Malay curried mince dish that is the country's unofficial national meal — under a pergola draped in grape vines while swallows darted overhead and the Helderberg mountains turned gold in the four o'clock light.

Pinotage tastes different in Stellenbosch. Not better, necessarily, than the same wine in a restaurant in London or New York. But different. Rooted. Specific. It tastes like the place it came from, and sitting in that place while you drink it creates a loop of flavour and landscape and light that is impossible to export and that is, I think, the real reason people visit wine country anywhere in the world — not for the wine itself but for the experience of drinking it where it was made, in the sun that made it.

Penguins, Paint, and Cobblestones

Boulders Beach should not work. The premise is absurd — a colony of African penguins living on a suburban beach, waddling among sunbathers, nesting under boardwalks, commuting to and from the ocean through a car park. And yet it works completely, because the penguins have no idea they are absurd. They are entirely serious. They stand in pairs on the sand, grooming each other with meticulous attention. They toboggan down the beach on their bellies. They swim with a speed and grace that makes their land-based waddling look like a deliberate comedy routine, which perhaps it is.

I watched them for an hour from the boardwalk. A penguin emerged from the surf, shook itself, and walked directly toward a tourist who was lying on a towel. The tourist sat up. The penguin stopped, assessed the situation, walked around the tourist with the unhurried detour of a commuter avoiding a puddle, and continued up the beach to its nest. The tourist laughed. Everyone on the beach laughed. The penguin did not acknowledge any of this.

From Boulders I drove north to the Bo-Kaap — the neighbourhood on the slopes of Signal Hill where every house is a different colour: cobalt, turquoise, lime, magenta, canary yellow, tangerine. The streets are cobblestoned. The air smells of cardamom and cumin from the Cape Malay cooking that originated here. The Bo-Kaap Mosque, the oldest in South Africa, sits at the top of the hill, pale green against the blue sky, and from its steps you can see the harbour and the waterfront and the sprawl of the city and, beyond it all, Table Mountain wearing its tablecloth of cloud.

The colours of the Bo-Kaap are not decorative. They are historical — painted by the freed slaves who settled here in the eighteenth century, who chose bright colours as an assertion of identity and freedom after generations of enforced uniformity. The paint has been refreshed and repainted over the centuries, but the impulse is the same, and walking through the streets you feel it — the insistence on visibility, on presence, on being seen. Cape Town is a city of layers. Every neighbourhood, every street, every view from every mountain carries more history than the postcard suggests. The beauty is real. The complication is real. They coexist, and the city does not ask you to choose between them. It asks you to hold both, and to walk the cobblestones, and to eat the bobotie, and to drink the pinotage, and to watch the penguins, and to climb the mountain, and to look in every direction and see a different world, and to understand that all of those worlds are the same place.