Western Cape

Two to three hours north of the city, the Cederberg is a range of weathered sandstone that has eroded into arches, overhangs and improbable balanced formations, coloured deep orange and red, with clear streams and rock pools in the valleys between. It is a wilderness area rather than a resort: accommodation is farm cottages and campsites, roads are largely gravel, phone signal is patchy, and the pleasure is walking, scrambling and swimming rather than being catered to. The range also holds a substantial body of San rock painting — a separate tradition from the great Drakensberg concentration on the other side of the country, generally more accessible and often reachable on a short walk from a farm track with the landowner's guidance. This is also the region where rooibos is grown, and the low, wispy bushes covering the flats between the mountains are the crop itself.

North of the city the shoreline is a different proposition from the warm-water coasts elsewhere in the country: the Atlantic here is genuinely cold, driven by an upwelling current, and swimming is a brief and bracing business. What it offers instead is a string of whitewashed fishing villages where the boats still land and crayfish and snoek are sold at the quayside, long empty beaches, and open-air seafood eaten on the sand. A coastal national park an hour or so from the city protects a large sheltered lagoon of extraordinarily clear turquoise water — a startling contrast to the ocean beyond the dunes — and is a serious birding destination.

For a few weeks in late winter and early spring, after a wet enough winter, the semi-arid country up the west coast and inland does something remarkable: annual seeds that have waited in the ground germinate at once and the landscape turns solidly to flowers, in orange, white and purple sheets running to the horizon. It is one of the great botanical events on earth and it happens on the back of one specific mechanism — winter rainfall arriving in a place otherwise too dry to support that growth. The timing and the intensity depend entirely on how much rain fell and when, so it moves year to year and can be modest in a poor season. Check locally before travelling for it, go on a sunny day and in the middle of the day, because the flowers close in cloud and open to face the sun.

Inland, a route runs east through a chain of mountain passes into a long semi-desert valley between two ranges, and it is the province's finest driving. The passes themselves are the attraction as much as anything — several were engineered in the nineteenth century by a remarkable road-builder whose dry-stone retaining walls still carry traffic, and they climb through gorges and river cuttings in a way modern roads have no need to. The valley they lead into is dry, hot, wide and thinly populated, with small towns of tin roofs and jacarandas, farm stalls, and a distinct wine and brandy culture of its own, quite separate from the famous estates nearer the city that are set out in the Winelands guide. At its eastern end sits the ostrich-farming town, where a nineteenth-century boom in feathers for the European fashion trade built extravagant sandstone mansions that still stand, and a nearby limestone cave system that runs deep into a mountain. Running out along this route and back along the coast, or the reverse, turns a there-and-back into a loop.

South and east of the city, over a mountain pass, the province opens into rolling wheat and canola country that turns brilliant green in winter and gold in summer, dotted with white gabled farmhouses. This is the Overberg, and it runs down to a coast known for whales in the colder months. At its southern edge is a fact worth getting right: the southernmost point of Africa is not the famous cape on the peninsula near the city, but a low, rocky, distinctly unspectacular headland well to the east, and it is here rather than there that the boundary between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans is formally drawn. There is a marker, a lighthouse and a boardwalk, and the pleasure of it is precisely that it is modest — a genuine continental extremity that has resisted being turned into a spectacle. Nearby, a long-established coastal reserve protects some of the best-preserved lowland fynbos anywhere.

The province has a Mediterranean climate, which puts it out of step with the rest of the country: rain falls in winter, roughly June to August, and the summers are hot, dry and often extremely windy. Summer suits the coast and the mountains; winter is green, quiet and cold, and brings the whales and, at its end, the flowers. Spring and autumn are the reliable all-rounders. A car is necessary for all of it — the Cederberg, the west coast, the Karoo route and the Overberg are all rural and public transport does not serve them meaningfully. Distances are moderate by South African standards, mostly two to four hours from the city, which makes the province unusually well suited to a series of two-night trips out and back rather than one long circuit.