Cape Point and Cape Peninsula Tour, Private Full Day From Cape Town

Cape Peninsula & Cape Point

Two oceans, wild baboons, a thousand penguins and the southwestern tip of Africa.

This is the day most guests remember for the rest of their lives. We leave the city along the Atlantic Seaboard, where the cold Benguela current keeps the water icy and the beaches of Clifton and Camps Bay impossibly white, with the Twelve Apostles towering above the road.

In Hout Bay, a fishing village that once jokingly issued its own passports as the Republic of Hout Bay, the harbour still smells of fresh catch. Boats run out to Duiker Island, where thousands of Cape fur seals crowd the rocks.

Then comes Chapman's Peak Drive, named after John Chapman, a ship's pilot rowed ashore here in 1607 to search for food. Carved into the cliff face by hand between 1915 and 1922, the road twists through 114 curves in just nine kilometres, hanging above the Atlantic with views that stop conversation.

At Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, you stand at the most southwestern tip of Africa. Early sailors called it the Cape of Storms, and the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail these waters forever, was born here. The first lighthouse was built so high that it was often lost in cloud; after the Portuguese liner Lusitania struck the rocks below in 1911, a new one was built lower down, where it still shines today. The reserve is home to more than a thousand kinds of fynbos, along with ostriches, eland and bontebok.

Keep your windows closed for the Chacma baboons. The Peninsula troops are among the few baboons in the world that forage on the seashore, turning over rocks for mussels and limpets, and they are bold enough to open an unlocked car door.

Crossing to the False Bay side, the water turns warmer, carried by the Agulhas current from the Indian Ocean. At Boulders Beach, a colony that began with just two breeding pairs in 1982 has grown to around three thousand African penguins, waddling between granite boulders and holiday homes. Once called jackass penguins for their braying call, they were listed as critically endangered in 2024, which makes every visit here a privilege.

In naval Simon's Town, look for the statue of Just Nuisance, a Great Dane so loved by sailors that he was officially enlisted in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. We return through the fishing harbour of Kalk Bay and the painted Victorian bathing boxes of Muizenberg, where Agatha Christie learned to surf in 1922.

• Hout Bay harbour and the Duiker Island seals
• Chapman's Peak Drive, 114 curves above the sea
• Cape Point lighthouse and the Cape of Good Hope
• Baboons, ostriches and fynbos in the reserve
• Boulders Beach African penguin colony
• Simon's Town, Kalk Bay and Muizenberg