Cape Town's setting, on the Cape Peninsula, is simply stunning. A rugged tail of land washed by two seaboards and dominated by iconic Table Mountain, the peninsula culminates dramatically at the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve and the sea-pounded cliffs of Cape Point. To really get to grips with Cape Town you need to spend time outdoors: if walking up Table Mountain sounds like hard work, you can always take the cable car - or catch the train down the False Bay coast to claim a piece of the 150km of sandy beach that fringes the peninsula. Inland, there are terrific opportunities for hiking and picnicking in the many gardens and forests.
The heart of the city is an attractive collage of Georgian, Cape Dutch and Victorian architecture, built on the foundations of the slave society that occupied it for the first half of its 350-year existence. Eyed by the Portuguese, Dutch and English in their turn, it became the place where Europe, Asia and Africa met - in markets, alleyways and mosques. Today the city centre is as much of a cultural melting pot as ever, where coloured families from the Cape Flats do their shopping, young whites hang out in hip coffee bars, Muslims pray, street kids loiter on corners, buskers play to passing crowds and Africans converge from across the continent to hawk crafts.
While it's the legislative capital of South Africa, Cape Town is the least "African" city in the country: less than a quarter of its population are black Africans. The city's unique feature is the Creolized coloured culture, which evolved from the interaction between Europeans and slaves from East Africa and the Far East. Mosques in the Bo-Kaap quarter, adjacent to the city centre, add spice to the colonial streetscape; Cape cuisine combines local ingredients with Eastern flavours; and Cape jazz is heard in the coloured townships of the Cape Flats as well as city-centre clubs. Over fifty percent of Capetonians are coloured, while about 27 percent are white, descended mainly from Dutch and British settlers. To complicate matters, language fails to line up conveniently with ethnicity, and Afrikaans, the city's most widely spoken language, is used by a large proportion of coloureds and many whites. The city's minority African population predominantly speak Xhosa, one of South Africa's nine African languages, but English is the effective lingua franca of the city, and will get you by 99 percent of the time.
With its cultural variety, high standards of accommodation, smart restaurants, slick clubs, laid-back cafes and vibrant gay scene, Cape Town offers a truly cosmopolitan experience. Most visitors see areas that were classified under apartheid as "white" and still remain relatively safe and salubrious: radiating out from the city centre, the largely affluent suburbs cling to the slopes of Table Mountain or perch at the edge of the peninsula's two coasts. But for most Capetonians, exiled to the crowded townships and shantytowns on the Cape Flats, the harsh reality is one of sky-high murder rates, taxi wars, racketeering and gang fights. These areas, to the east of the city, should only be visited on a guided tour.
A stone's throw from the centre, the V & A Waterfront is Cape Town's most popular spot for shopping, eating and drinking in a highly picturesque setting among the piers and quays of a working harbour; from here catamarans cut across Table Bay to Robben Island, the notorious site of Nelson Mandela's incarceration. The rocky shore west of the Waterfront is occupied by the gritty inner-city suburbs of Green Point and Sea Point, whose main drag is lined with some of the peninsula's oldest and best restaurants, while their back streets are crammed with backpacker lodges, B&Bs and hotels. Equally good for accommodation, but leafy and salubrious in comparison, the City Bowl suburbs gaze down across the central business district on the matchbox ships in Duncan Dock.
An hour's drive east of the Cape Flats into the Western Cape interior are the beautiful Winelands, where you'll find elegant examples of Cape Dutch architecture, and can sample wonderful wines and excellent restaurants. Heading south along the coast you follow one of the most picturesque routes out of Cape Town to reach Hermanus, the largest settlement on the Whale Coast, and a fabulous spot for shore-based whale-watching.
