A mountain in the middle of the city. Elephants six hours north.
Which Cape Point day actually stops at Boulders. What a Kruger sunrise drive costs. Whether the Franschhoek tram beats a driver through Stellenbosch. Reviews of every tour you can book in South Africa.
Table Mountain, the Boulders penguins, a Winelands lunch, a game drive.
The four bookings a first South African trip is built around. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The first dayCape Town Tour: Table Mountain, Penguins & Cape Point+PickupCableway up, Boulders and Cape Point after, pickup included. Go on a clear morning; the cable car shuts in wind.
02The Winelands dayWine Tour: Paarl, Franschhoek & Stellenbosch incl 3 wineriesThree estates through Paarl, Franschhoek and Stellenbosch, with somebody else driving. The lunch runs long on purpose.
03The ferry to the islandRobben Island Ferry Ticket and Guided Prison TourThirty minutes across Table Bay to Robben Island, where former prisoners guide the prison. Sailings are weather-dependent and sell out days ahead.
04The bush, warm-up roundBig Five Game Reserve with LunchBig Five country two hours from Cape Town, with lunch. Book it early in the trip so Kruger has something to beat.
Reserve, park or private concession. Pick the kind of game drive.
Every South African itinerary has a safari in it, and they are not the same day out. Three kinds, what it costs to get on each one, and how far from the city they start.
Six places to sleep, and the day out that justifies each.
A city under a flat-topped mountain, a peninsula that ends at two oceans, valleys of vines an hour inland, a park the size of a small country, a coast road with a bungee on it, and the gold city on the highveld.
The days out more South African travellers take than any other.
The whole South African catalogue →One of each, rather than eight versions of the same peninsula run: a mountain, a vineyard, a game reserve, a coast road.
1
Wine Tour: Paarl, Franschhoek & Stellenbosch incl 3 wineries
Spend about eight hours visiting three Cape Winelands regions by comfortable coach. Taste 15 wines, tour a Stellenbosch cellar, pair wine with cheese and sweets, walk historic Stellenbosch, and stop at Drakenstein Prison. Guides such as Louis, Brahm, Horea, and Charles have helped make this a lively, informative day.
From · $43
Read our review →
2
Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with Optional Cruise
from $23
3
Cape of Good Hope & Penguins Day Tour with Pickup
from $52
4
Zipline Cape Town – From Foot of Table Mountain Reserve
from $49
5
Big Five Game Reserve with Lunch
from $236
6
Robben Island Ferry Ticket and Guided Prison Tour
from $79
7
Tandem Paragliding Adventure
from $109
8
From Johannesburg: Pilanesberg Nature Reserve Game Safari
from $186
Cape Town: the mountain early, the hard history after.
All of Cape Town →
Go up while the cloud is off the table, then come down to the parts of the city that take longer to explain. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the Cape.
Cable car up, or Platteklip on foot
The cable car runs when the wind lets it, and the queue is shortest in the first hour. Platteklip Gorge is a straight, hot, three-hour climb with no shade and a cable-car ride down if your legs are finished.
Robben Island, and what came after
The ferry leaves from the V&A Waterfront and the prison sections are led by men who were held there. Pair it with the District Six Museum in town, which tells the other half of the story from the mainland side.
The Bo-Kaap, and a Cape Malay table
Painted houses above the city, a mosque older than most of the buildings around it, and a cooking tradition brought from the Indonesian archipelago. Most walks end at a table with samoosas and koeksisters.
Kruger: the gates open at sunrise, and so should you.
Twenty thousand square kilometres of bushveld along the Mozambique border. Animals move at dawn and dusk and sleep through the middle of the day, which is why the good drives leave in the dark and the bad ones leave after breakfast.
Every Kruger safari →
The rand does the work: what a day out costs here.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. The exchange rate is on your side here: a great many of the best days come in under the cost of dinner at home.
City walks, the cableway, township and Bo-Kaap tours, estate tastings and the shorter peninsula runs.
The full-day standards: Cape Point and the penguins, three-estate Winelands days, whale boats out of Hermanus.
Private game drives, multi-day Kruger trips, shark cage dives and helicopter time over the Cape.
Penguins, right whales and a seal colony in water that never warms up.
The Benguela current runs up this coast from the Antarctic, which is why the swimming is brief and the wildlife is extraordinary. The best of it is reached by boat, from a harbour, early.
The Cape Winelands: mountains, vines and nobody driving home.
Dutch gables in Stellenbosch, a hop-on tram through Franschhoek, cellars cut into the Simonsberg. The wine is cheap by any standard you are used to and the mountains behind the vineyards do half the work. Take a driver, not a hire car.
The Garden Route is a coast road with something bolted to every bridge.
Six hundred kilometres from Mossel Bay to Storms River: lagoons at Knysna, forest at Tsitsikamma, ostriches inland at Oudtshoorn and the highest bridge bungee on earth at Bloukrans. Addo and its elephants sit at the far end of it.
- 12-Day Safari at Garden Route Game Lodgefrom $533
- 2Swim with Sealsfrom $61
- 3Knysna Ziplines Tourfrom $48
Three things that happen in South Africa and almost nowhere else.
Beaches and game parks exist across the continent. A penguin colony inside a commuter suburb, a cave system holding the oldest of our relatives, and a boat full of great whites two hours from a wine farm do not.
The Boulders Colony
African penguins arrived at Boulders in 1982, two breeding pairs on a beach at the bottom of a naval town, and there are now several thousand of them nesting between the granite and the back gardens. Boardwalks keep you off the dunes, the birds ignore you entirely, and the swimming beach next door is open to everyone.
- 1Cape of Good Hope & Penguins Day Tour with Pickup★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 3,362 reviews
- 2Cape Point & Boulders Beach Full-Day Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 3,032 reviews
- 3Cape of Good Hope & Boulder Penguins Full-Day Tour from Cape Town★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,347 reviews
The Cradle of Humankind
An hour from Johannesburg the dolomite is riddled with caves, and the caves held Mrs Ples, Little Foot and Homo naledi. Sterkfontein is still an active dig; you walk down past the working face into chambers that were sealed for two million years. The site museum at Maropeng handles the big picture, the cave handles the goosebumps.
- 1Maropeng Cradle of Humankind Museum &Sterkfontein Cave Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 155 reviews
- 2Cradle of Humankind, Caves or Maropeng, Rhino and Lion Park★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 74 reviews
- 3From Johannesburg: Cradle of Humankind Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 72 reviews
Shark Alley
The channel between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock holds a seal colony sixty thousand strong, which is why the great whites came, and why the cage boats leave Kleinbaai before eight. You are in the water for a few minutes at a time in a wetsuit, on the surface, holding a bar. Bronze whalers and copper sharks turn up on most trips; the whites are a good season, not a guarantee.
- 1Shark Cage Diving and Viewing with transport from Cape Town★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 576 reviews
- 2Gansbaai Eco-Friendly Shark Cage Diving Cruise★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 326 reviews
- 3Half-Day White Shark Cage Diving from Gansbaai★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 310 reviews
Four bookings here run on a timetable that is not yours.
Most of this country can be sorted out the night before from a guesthouse veranda. These four run on ferry timetables, park gates, wind and a whale calendar that does not care when you land.
- 01Robben Island Ferry Ticket and Guided Prison TourOne operator, a fixed sailing timetable and a capped boat. Sailings are cancelled outright in a big swell, so the earlier days of your stay are the safer ones to book.
- 02Table Mountain Cable Car, Hop-On Hop-Off Bus TourThe cableway closes in high wind and in cloud on the table, sometimes for days. Buy a dated ticket for a clear forecast, not for the day you happen to be free.
- 03Hoedspruit: Sunrise Safari in Greater Kruger Private ReserveKruger gates open at first light and the vehicles that leave then are the ones that see cats. Those seats are taken well before the ones on a mid-morning drive.
- 04Boat Based Whale Watching ExperienceSouthern right whales calve in Walker Bay roughly June to November and are gone the rest of the year. Inside the season the boats fill; outside it there is nothing to see.
The southeaster shuts the mountain. Here is the rest of the Cape.
Two things rearrange a Cape day. The summer southeaster pulls the tablecloth over the mountain and stops the cableway and most boats; the winter rain, May to August, does the same by other means. Both have the same answer. Go inland, go underground, or go somewhere with a roof and a cellar.
By place — coast, Cape and bushveld
By kind of day — bush, boat, mountain or table
Cape Town, the Winelands, the coast road, then the bush: the run almost everybody does first.
The South African write-ups we filed most recently.
Newer South African write-ups →
Private Cape Town City Tour table Mountain with wine tasting
Read our review →
Cape of Good Hope and Penguin Beach Tour in Cape Town
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Cape of Good Hope and Boulders Beach Group Tour in Cape Town
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Cape Peninsula Helicopter Private Tour with Stellenbosch Wine Tasting & Lunch
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Private 2-Day Cape Town Highlights: Robben Island,Table Mountain Tickets & Wine
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Cape Town Aquila Private Game Reserve Big Five Safari Adventure
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Private Transfer: CPT Airport to Cape Town in Luxury Van
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