Cape Point
"The sign says it's not technically the southernmost point of Africa. I stood there anyway, as if the ocean cared about the distinction."
I’d been told Cape Point was anticlimactic after the drive — too many tourists, too much signage, a funicular that reduces what should feel like a pilgrimage into a theme park ride. I walked the whole thing on foot anyway, up the footpath from the car park below, through fynbos that smelled of resin and salt, the wind accelerating as I climbed. By the time I reached the old lighthouse perched on the cliff face, there was nothing anticlimactic about it. The Atlantic was in full argument with the rocks below. I couldn’t hear anything else.
Cape Point is the southern tip of the Cape Point Nature Reserve, which forms the lower third of Table Mountain National Park. The point itself is a narrow blade of rock that narrows as it descends to two separate promontories — the old lighthouse above, which no longer functions because fog rendered it useless, and the working lighthouse on the lower point. Most people take the funicular up and never walk down to the lower level. Walk down. The path out along the cliff edge to the southwest, where you can sit above the churning swells with nothing between you and Antarctica, is where the place becomes serious.
The Cape of Good Hope — the southwestern corner of the peninsula — is about a kilometer’s walk from the main Cape Point area, through fynbos and past grazing bontebok that regard you with complete indifference. The famous sign with its painted lettering draws a queue of tour groups. I joined the queue. You can’t not. But the moment I’d taken the obligatory photograph, I turned east and walked the cliff path alone, found a ledge with a direct view south across open water, and sat there long enough that a troop of baboons passed within arm’s reach without looking at me twice. The baboons of Cape Point have an assessment system. They determined I wasn’t carrying food.
The tidal pools at the base of the reserve — reachable only on calm days when you can scramble down the rocks — hold starfish and sea urchins in colors that look wrong, too saturated, like illustrations from a marine biology textbook. Above the pools, the fynbos runs in thick green waves across the hillsides, and in spring it erupts in proteas and pincushions and small orange things I’ve never learned the names of. The Peninsula’s biodiversity is genuinely strange — this small finger of land holds more plant species per square kilometer than the entire British Isles, most of them found nowhere else on earth.
On the drive back north I stopped at the tidal pool at Platboom Beach, where the reserve road curves near the shore. Three people in the world were there. The water was the temperature of a cold refrigerator and I swam anyway, because the rock above me was the color of rust and the sea was the color of glass and it seemed like the right thing to do.
When to go: October through March for clear skies and manageable crowds before noon. Summer afternoons bring the Cape Doctor — the southeaster — which can make the cliff walks brutal after 2pm. Arrive early, before the tour buses, and the upper lighthouse path is almost always quiet. Winter brings cloud and drama and the whales in False Bay, a different kind of spectacular altogether.