Around Town | Travel + Leisure
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Around Town

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Last year, the British Broadcasting Corporation invited its viewers to name "Fifty Places to See Before You Die." Cape Town was ranked number five overall, and the most beloved city on the entire planet. Herewith, eight things to indulge in when you get there.

1. Climb Table Mountain
One of the great wonders of the natural world, an awesome monolith of flat-topped sandstone and granite, rearing 3,560 feet above the breakers in Table Bay. A cable car will take you to the summit, from which you can see 70 miles in all directions, but the view is best savored after a grueling climb. Pack a rucksack, tackle the path up Skeleton Gorge, and leave with memories that will haunt you forever. www.tablemountain.co.za

2. Visit the Winelands
Good wine is absurdly cheap in the winelands north and east of Cape Town—less than $2 for a drinkable Shiraz from the arid Swartland, about double that for a fine Merlot or Cabernet. At the top of the scale stands Vergelegen, judged in 2001 (by the French, no less) to have made the best Bordeaux-style red blend on earth; a bottle sells for just $12. "It's heartbreaking," says wine maker André van Rensburg, who argues that lingering prejudice against South Africa causes Cape wines to be drastically underpriced. His pain, your gain. Tastings from $2 per person, lunch for two $22. Laurensford Rd.; 27-21/847-1334; www.vergelegen.co.za

3. Commune with Wildflowers
Locals converse earnestly about Fynbos, the seventh floral kingdom, found naturally only around the Western Cape. The mountains are covered with proteas. Peace lilies choke the marshes. Purple geraniums cloak the wastelands. Jerusalem for Fynbos fanatics is Cecil Rhodes's old Kirstenbosch estate, where the National Botanic Institute presides over 1,300 acres of Fynbos gardens. Kirstenbosch; 27-21/799-8783; www.nbi.co.za

4. Dine in Sea Spray
The Harbour House Restaurant was once a fish factory, standing so close to the sea that it seemed suspended above the water. Now epicures dine there on fish caught the same morning, bought off the boats in the adjoining old harbor. After dinner on a stormy night, repair to the bar downstairs, take a seat beside the fire, order a 20-year-old Cape brandy ($4), and wait for high tide, when giant seas heave up in the floodlights, racing toward the picture windows in a great tumult of ice-white spume. Dinner for two $30. Kalk Bay Harbour; 27-21/788-4133

5. Stand on the Very Tip of Africa
The road to the continent's edge passes through Clifton, where film stars and supermodels disport themselves in summer, then winds for miles along the French Riviera-like coast before climbing over to Hout Bay. The famed corniche around Chapman's Peak is currently closed to traffic, so you have to detour to Noordhoek, beyond which the road skirts misty cliffs and crosses bleak plains before coming to brooding Cape Point, where Africa dives into the tumbling seas of the South Atlantic. Cape Point Information Center; 27-21/780-9204; www.capepeninsula.co.za

6. Eat Atjar and Blatjang
Dragged to the Cape as slaves or prisoners, Malays and Javanese unpacked their spices and transformed local food from the boiled ho-hum into Cape Malay cuisine. Explore this culinary subculture at the Cape Malay (93 Brommersvlei Rd., Constantia; 27-21/ 794-2137; dinner for two $26), a hotel restaurant that serves your basic boboties (meat pies), bredies (stews), curries, atjars (chutneys), and blatjangs (sweet sauces). More ambitious is the Quarterdeck (Portswood Road, V&A Waterfront; 27-21/418-3281; dinner for two $35), a seaside boîte whose menu represents the entire Cape Malay canon, from kool frikkadelle (clove-seasoned meatballs) to boeber (a milk pudding). Purists might wish to stagger on to Perima's (Belvedere and Lansdowne Rds., Claremont; 27-21/671-3205; dinner for two $20), where chef Gayla Naicker creates what she insists is the mother of all curries.

7. Stay in a Guesthouse
Modeled on the French pension, these institutions are often located outside the congested city, closer to places of beauty. Colona Castle (1 Verwood St., off Old Boyes Dr., Lakeside, Cape Town; 27-21/788-8235; www.link.co.za; doubles from $150, including breakfast) clings to the mountain near Muizenberg; its Italianate terrace commands views of False Bay. Montague House (18 Leeuwenhof Rd., Higgovale, Cape Town; 27-21/424-7337; www.montaguehouse.net; doubles from $120, including breakfast) is a marvelously incongruous Afro-Elizabethan fantasy, with suites named after Shakespeare's plays and a garden filled with grapefruit trees and frangipani. Roggeland Country House (Roggeland Rd., Paarl; 27-21/868-2501; www.roggeland.co.za; doubles from $150, including breakfast and dinner) is an 18th-century farmstead at the foot of the Klein Drakenstein mountain.

8. Tour the Other Cape Town
Board a bus filled with earnest counterculture types in sandals and dashikis. Drive out to Langa township, where tribal initiation ceremonies are conducted in the shadow of a power station and cattle graze on the freeway shoulder. Visit crafts projects, nursery schools, traditional healers, and the tin shacks of desperately poor but friendly people. A sweet, safe, and nonthreatening way of catching the afterglow of South Africa's Nelson Mandela miracle. Full-day tour $28, including lunch. Cape Cares Tour the Pinnacle, Burg and Castle Sts.; 27-21/426-4260; www.cape-town.org

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