Kaapstad

Cape Town is wedged between a flat-topped mountain and the Atlantic. Table Mountain rises a thousand metres straight out of the city, and a rotating cable car reaches the summit in about five minutes. White sand runs along Clifton 4th Beach and Camps Bay Beach at the foot of the range, and at Boulders Beach a colony of penguins shares the sand with swimmers. Further south, the road cut into the cliff at Chapman's Peak hangs over open water, and Cape Point Nature Reserve ends the peninsula in baboon-haunted heath. The city carries a heavy history and tells it plainly, at the District Six Museum and at the Iziko Bo-Kaap Museum, on a street of hand-painted houses. Offshore, a ferry crosses to the island prison where Nelson Mandela served eighteen of his twenty-seven years. The Stellenbosch vineyards are forty-five minutes away, and Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden grows flowers found nowhere else on earth.