After the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon: The Cape Peninsula

The Route: Cape Town → Hout Bay → Chapman's Peak Drive → Simon's Town → Cape Point → back Logistics: Hire car or a guided vehicle. Around 1.5 hours to Cape Point without stops, considerably more with them. Chapman's Peak is a toll road and closes in high wind or after rockfall. Marathon Month: May Duration: Day trip

Cape Town ──> Hout Bay ──(Chapman's Peak Drive)──> Noordhoek
                                                      │
                                    Boulders Beach ◄──┘
                                          │
                                          ▼
                                  Cape Point Nature Reserve

This is the standard day out from Cape Town and it earns the position. It is also close to the ideal thing to do on tired legs, because the distance is covered by vehicle and the walking happens in short, flat instalments. Start early: the road is slow by design and the light on the Atlantic side goes first.

Check Chapman's Peak before you set off. It is a toll road and it shuts for wind and rockfall without much notice, which adds an hour on the inland detour if you find out at the gate.

Chapman's Peak Drive

The road runs about 9 km between Hout Bay and Noordhoek, cut into the side of the mountain above the Atlantic with 114 bends in it. There are laybys the whole way along and the two or three at the southern end give the view back up the coast. In May the cold fronts come through from the north-west, so the sea below is usually doing something worth stopping for.

Boulders Beach and Simon's Town

Boulders, on the False Bay side just south of Simon's Town, holds one of the few land-based African penguin colonies in the world. The birds nest among granite boulders on a sheltered beach and the site is run by SANParks with raised boardwalks over the dunes, so the viewing is done on the flat with the colony a few metres away. There is an entry fee. Go in the morning if you can: the car park is small and fills.

Simon's Town itself is a Royal Navy station turned South African naval base, with a single Victorian main street along the water and somewhere to eat lunch.

Cape Point

Cape Point Nature Reserve occupies the tip of the peninsula, a landscape of low fynbos, ostriches, baboons and the two headlands. The old lighthouse sits at the top of a steep path, and there is a funicular that runs up to it, which on the day after a marathon is money well spent. Cape of Good Hope, the actual south-western corner of Africa, is a separate car park a few minutes away and involves a flat walk to a sign that everyone photographs.

Southern right whales move into the bays along this coast through the winter, and by late May the first of them are sometimes visible from the coastal roads on the False Bay side. It is not reliable in May, but it is worth looking.

Keep food out of sight. The baboons in the reserve are practised at car doors and open bags.

Where to Stay and Eat

Where to stay: This is a day trip from wherever you are staying in Cape Town. If you want to slow it down, Simon's Town and Kalk Bay both have small guesthouses on the False Bay side, half an hour closer to the point.

Where to eat: Kalk Bay, a few kilometres north of Simon's Town, is the better lunch stop on the way back: a working harbour with fish restaurants on the main road and a row of bookshops and cafés. Hout Bay, on the outward leg, does the same job earlier in the day.

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