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Phantom ships, braying penguins, brazen baboons, wandering ostriches, hoards of tourists - South Africa's Cape Peninsula has them all

By Jack Souther With her blasphemous captain lashed to the helm and her ghostly crew battling a perpetual gale the Flying Dutchman is doomed to sail until judgment day into the teeth of a storm without ever rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

By Jack Souther

With her blasphemous captain lashed to the helm and her ghostly crew battling a perpetual gale the Flying Dutchman is doomed to sail until judgment day into the teeth of a storm without ever rounding the Cape of Good Hope. There are as many versions of this old mariner's yarn as there are shipwrecks off the coast of southern Africa. Long before Richard Wagner adapted the tale to his opera, the Flying Dutchman was part of maritime legend and sighting the phantom ship was taken as an omen of impending doom.

The Cape of Good Hope is actually not the most southerly point of Africa. That distinction belongs to Cape Agulhas, 150 km to the east and 50 km farther south, but Good Hope, at the southern end of the Cape Peninsula, gets most of the attention — and for good reason. The Cape Peninsula, that crooked finger of land projecting from the southwest coast of Africa, is where the cold, Benguela Current flowing north out of Antarctica clashes with the tropical Agulhas Current flowing westward out of the Indian Ocean. Bartolomeu Dias, the Portuguese mariner who first rounded the point in 1488 named it the Cape of Storms. It was John II of Portugal who later christened it "Good Hope", in reference to the fact that mariners who made it around the cape had a fighting chance of getting to the Orient and back home to Europe.

Until the Suez Canal was dug in 1869 clipper ships plying the trade route between Europe, Australia, and the Orient were forced to run the gauntlet of the cape's turbulent waters and many of them didn't make it. In 1648 the crew of the shipwrecked Harlem planted some seeds near their camp in Table Bay at the north end of the Cape Peninsula. Their garden did so well that the Dutch East India Company decided to establish a refuge there where ships could re-supply and repair their rigging. The "Company's Garden" provided sailors with fresh vegetables to augment their diet of salt pork and dried beans. The bars and brothels flourished and the place became known as The Tavern of the Seas. Today that rowdy and rollicking 17th century out-port has become the modern port-city of Cape Town and The Company's Garden is now a carefully tended city park — a refuge where both locals and tourists gather to enjoy a morning coffee in the shade of trees that were planted there more than 300 years ago. And that is where we began our trip to the Cape of Good Hope.

We joined Daytrippers who offer a mix of driving, cycling, and hiking. It's only about 30 km from Cape Town to The Cape but we took our time — hiking up to viewpoints, riding the bikes, visiting a penguin colony, and stopping for a picnic lunch at Buffels Bay. The coast road follows the east side of the peninsula, alternately clinging to precipitous cliffs and skirting broad sandy beaches shelving into the warm waters of False Bay. From Cape Town south to Simon's Town the waterfront is a succession of small towns, tourist resorts, and suburban homes. With both rail and road access this part of the False Bay waterfront has been a favoured residential suburb for generations of Cape Town residents. The penguins moved in later.

The residential community of Boulders, south of Simon's Town, faces a sheltered cove strewn with giant rounded outcrops of granite. In 1982 two pairs of African Penguins, known also as Jackass Penguins because of their loud braying, discovered the place, liked it, and decided to stay. With a decline in commercial trawling in False Bay the birds found plenty of pilchards and anchovies to feed their kids and the colony has now grown to an estimated 3,000 birds. Much to the dismay of the original residents of this once quiet neighbourhood the braying penguins have attracted at least an equal number of tourists, but since both are protected by law, they can't do much about it.

When we visited the colony in early November the penguins were just beginning their annual molt and their natty black and white tuxes were already looking a bit frayed. Without their protective plumage the birds are unable to enter the water and feed. They had bulked up on fish before the molt and now, observing a sort of avian Lent, they stood around in the hundreds, fasting and growing a coat of new feathers.

South of Boulders the Cape Peninsula lies almost entirely within the Table Mountain National Park and Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. There is little human presence and, except for hiking trails, the desolate, windblown landscape, bounded by precipitous sea cliffs, has not changed much since the first Dutch explorers ventured here 350 years ago. With neither trees for lumber nor soil for agriculture the place was never settled and today a variety of wild creatures still roam its brush-covered hills. We saw a small herd of eland, a lone hartebeest, and dozens of baboons. At Buffels Bay a pair of ostriches tended their newly hatched family while we ate lunch. And although there are no trees the rolling hills are covered with a profusion of flowering shrubs that have adapted to the harsh, windy conditions of the peninsula. Known as Fynbos (Afrikaans for fine bush) there are more than 8,000 different species of these hardy, small-leaved plants in the Cape Floral Kingdom, giving this tiny region of South Africa the greatest density of plant species on earth and claim to one of only six of the world’s floral kingdoms.

The Cape of Good Hope itself is a low finger of rock protruding from the south coast while the main part of the peninsula swings eastward to Cape Point. Although Good Hope is slightly farther south it is Cape Point that forms the dramatic cliffs at the very tip of the Cape Peninsula. That is where the main road ends — in a parking lot teeming with tourists. A funicular railway leaves the parking area every few minutes for a viewing platform at the Old Lighthouse but there is a perfectly good hiking path, which we elected to use instead. The steep pathway winds through a succession of platforms built into the side of the cliff to where the Old Lighthouse stands atop a pillar of rock 238 metres above the sea. The lighthouse was built in 1860 but on foggy days, and there are many, when the light was shrouded in sea mist, ships continued to pile into the rocks of Cape Point. In 1919 a new, more powerful light was installed closer to the water. The original light was extinguished but the Old Lighthouse continues to attract tourists from around the world. And the views on a clear day are truly dramatic — west across the churning Atlantic surf to the sandstone cliffs of the Cape of Good Hope, east across False Bay to the Hottentots Holland Mountains. And it's about 4,000 km of open-ocean from here to Antarctica — the next land to the south.

From Cape Point we hiked to the Cape of Good Hope. The 2.5 km trail follows the edge of the sea cliffs and a spur trail winds down through sandstone ledges past towering sea stacks to a sandy beach facing the south Atlantic surf. The hike was invigorating but after the dramatic outlook from Cape Point the Cape of Good Hope itself is anticlimactic. But the people- and baboon-watching is fun.

The parking lot at the Cape of Good Hope is alive with thieves. Chacma baboons shamelessly check every car for open windows and pilfer anything they can reach. They are not averse to purse snatching in broad daylight, particularly if the bag contains a hint of food, and they have learned to take full advantage of unwary tourists. There is a sign at one end of the parking lot proclaiming this to be "Cape of Good Hope — the most south-western point of the African Continent". Almost everyone poses there for a picture and the baboons are waiting — put something down while you aim the camera and before you can say, "smile" it's gone. I watched one baboon snatch a woman's water bottle and, adding insult to loss, hop up on top of her car to gnaw it open.

The drive back along the wild Atlantic coast on the west side of the peninsula was a dramatic climax to our day. Back in Cape Town we returned to the Company's Gardens and ordered a cool drink from the same waitress who had served our morning coffee. And as we relaxed and reflected on all the things we had seen and learned on our tour of The Cape it seemed that we must have been on the road much more than a single day.