SEVEN DAYS IN CAPE TOWN BY SEAN FRASER, STRUIK TRAVEL & HERITAGE, R250 F

IRST published in 1998, this best-selling (over 60 000 copies) guide to Cape Town and its surrounds has been through four editions and more reprints since.

Clearly it sells, but obviously Cape Town is evolving and developing so quickly that updates are required regularly.

This is a guide book that doubles as a souvenir coffee-table book so by now there must be copies scattered around the globe, and in many South African homes.

The pictures are almost all familiar, but then we live here.

Cape Town is so popular internationally because it has so much to offer: more beauty, history and culture packed into it than any other city in South Africa. After all, it has the perfect location and has been around the longest.

Most tourists come for a week or two, hence the useful division of seven chapters covering the city, area by area, in seven days. These are the city centre, the V&A Waterfront and Robben Island, Table Mountain and Kirstenbosch, the Atlantic seaboard, False Bay, Constantia and the Southern Suburbs, and the Northern Suburbs.

Then there are six more chapters of excursions from the city: Stellenbosch, Paarl, Franschhoek, the West and South Cape Coasts, and the Garden route.

Each chapter has a sidebar of “useful information” — addresses, phone numbers and opening times.

A few restaurants are mentioned but in a city fairly obsessed with good and new restaurants, this is shaky but necessary ground for a general guidebook.

This is a hell of a lot to cover so the detail given is basic and limited. That must be a hard call: it’s all most tourists want, others might prefer more.

Important and useful inclusions are maps of the routes taken by the Hop-on, Hop-off City Sightseeing open-top, double decker buses, tailor-made for tourists, and the more extensive MyCiTi bus routes, used by both tourists and residents.

The latter is a schematic map like that of the London Underground, covering a vast area from Atlantis to Hout Bay and Khayelitsha, so it could be confusing if you don’t have a grasp of the city and where you want to go, but there is no other way to get it on a page, anywhere. Not even on a poster.

After 18 years, maybe Fraser could look into splitting the book into two and making both more substantial, one on Cape Town; one on the excursions. Springbok and Plettenberg Bay are both far away, and there is much to write about on the way.

A small correction: Prince Alfred, who inaugurated the Alfred Basin in 1860, was not the eldest son of Queen Victoria but her second eldest. If he was, we would have Alfredian buildings in Cape Town, not Edwardian ones. How many proofreaders in all those editions?