Wanderlust Travel Magazine (UK)
Go later: Cape Town
THE DESTINATION: CAPE TOWN Amazing scenery, intense culture and diverse, rich cuisine: Cape Town looks like a great first choice on your revised to do list once travelling resumes – especially with new flights announced
Amazing scenery, intense culture and rich, diverse cuisine: there’s every reason why Cape Town in South Africa should be your first port of call once the world starts travelling again
Acontender for the world’s most attractive city, Cape Town boasts a mix of oceans and mountains, fine dining and old wineries, and a diversity of flora and fauna. But it also offers ease of travel: although it’s nearly Africa’s southernmost point, you can still get there on a direct flight from London – including the resumed Virgin service, come October – many of which are overnight and involve only an hour or two in time difference.
Clear your head after the flight with a walk in the sunshine. The flat-top Table Mountain forms a backdrop to Cape Town’s city bowl and is criss-crossed with trails offering vantage points of the city’s craggy peaks and ocean. If you’re not feeling so energetic, the cable car can whisk you right to the top.
Spend some time acquainting yourself with SA’S complex history. Just offshore, Robben Island prison has been preserved as a monument to the many anti-apartheid activists who were held here, including Nelson Mandela. The walking and cycling tours run by 18 Gangster Museum offer an insight to gang culture from former members in the city’s largest township of Khayelitsha. You can also tap further into the region at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA), the largest museum of modern African art in the world, or on a street art tour around the hipster ‘hood of Woodstock.
Over the past few years, Cape Town’s foodie scene has exploded, with dozens of new openings alongside long-standing institutions. Get ready for creative menus with regional ingredients, sleek tapas bars, Cape Malay curries and samosas in the candycoloured Bo-kaap neighbourhood and fish and chip shacks by the harbour in Hout Bay.
All of this pairs nicely with the vast array of local wines, craft beers and various gins infused with fynbos, the vegetation native to this part of South Africa. Either enjoy a suitable sundowner at a beachfront bar in Camps Bay or take a sunset kayak out onto the water – keep your eyes peeled for playful dolphins and whales.
The number of African penguins in the Boulders Beach colony. In 1982, there were only two breeding pairs. You can see the tiny penguins from the boardwalks at Boulders or Foxy Beach.