Wildlife & Wild Places
This bay has been emptied and refilled twice in two hundred years, and that is the reason it is worth watching now.
Whalers took around twelve thousand southern right whales off this coast between 1785 and 1805. By 1920 there were roughly sixty breeding females left in the world. They were protected in 1935, and there are now about six and a half thousand in South African waters. The largest breeding stock anywhere, and still under a tenth of what was here before.
The great white sharks have gone the other way. Two hundred sightings a year in False Bay until 2017, and rare since. Two orcas get most of the blame; the research points more at what we have taken out of the water around them.
So: penguins breeding on a suburban beach, whales calving ninety minutes east, thousands of seals off Hout Bay, and a floral kingdom on the mountain with more plant species than the whole of Britain. Two of our guides have spent their careers studying this coast. Nothing here is guaranteed. Wild animals do as they like, and the good days are better for it.
Penguins at Boulders, from the water
African penguins nest on the granite at Boulders, and almost everyone sees them from a boardwalk with two hundred other people. We come in by kayak from Simon’s Town instead, quiet, low to the water, at their eye level. The colony has been in steep decline for two decades, which is part of why we go and part of what your guide will talk about.
Private guide · Our own kayaks · Wetsuits & safety · Half day
Whale season on the Overberg
Southern right whales come into the bays east of the Cape between June and December to calve, and by September they are close enough to watch from a cliff path without a boat. We drive the whale coast, stop where the water is deep against the rocks, and give the day enough time to actually sit and look.
Private guide · Vehicle · Lunch on the coast · Full day · Jun–Dec
Fynbos, and the smallest floral kingdom on earth
The Cape Floral Kingdom is the smallest of the world’s six and the richest for its size. Thousands of species, most of them found nowhere else, a great many of them on the mountain above your hotel. Walked with someone who can name what you’re looking at, an ordinary slope turns into something else entirely.
Private guide · Vehicle · Reserve entry · Half day
Into the kelp forest
The Atlantic side of the Peninsula sits inside the Great African Seaforest, the kelp system that runs the length of this coast, and the water that made My Octopus Teacher. We work along the shoreline for a day: rock pools at low tide, the shallows where the kelp starts, and the granite reefs that hold octopus, shysharks, urchins and a great deal most people never think to look for. It is twelve degrees most of the year, so wetsuits. How far in you go is up to you. Some people snorkel out over the canopy, some watch it from the rocks and are no less taken with it.
Private guide · Wetsuits & gear if wanted · Vehicle · Low-tide dependent · Half day
Sharks, with the people who study them
A day east with our shark specialist, someone who works on these animals for a living rather than sells tickets to them. You go where the season and the water say the sharks are, which most of the year means the coast beyond Hermanus. Low-impact and cage-free where conditions allow it, and honest when they do not. Built for people who want to understand what they are looking at, not just tick one off.
It is the same water the southern rights come into between June and December, so in season the day is often both. Sharks on the boat, whales on the way back.
Shark conservation specialist · Private guide · Vehicle from Cape Town · Boat & permits · Whales in season (Jun–Dec) · Full day · Weather-dependent
Horseback on Noordhoek Long Beach
Eight kilometres of open sand on the Peninsula’s Atlantic side, backed by wetland and dune and closed off at the northern end by Chapman’s Peak. Riding is how you cover it properly — along the waterline where the sand is firm, the turquoise running up beside you and the mountain behind. Horses have worked this beach for generations, which is why there are usually more of them on it than people.
Cold Atlantic, open water
Sandstone & fynbos
Further afield
The Cape, up close
Old vines, long tables
Go and see them.
Tell us when you are here and what pulls you. We will shape the day around you.