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Backpacking Cape Town

You've probably seen photographs of Cape Town. You may even have thought: okay, looks impressive, I get it. You do not get it, not from a photograph. Not even close.

The thing about Cape Town that no image adequately conveys is the scale. This is a city built inside an amphitheatre. A flat-topped sandstone mountain — one thousand metres high, three kilometres wide — rises directly behind the city centre and simply dominates everything. From the sea, from the beaches, from every street corner, it is always there, turning slowly in its own cloud, watching. At night, it is lit from below and glows amber. In summer, a white cloud pours over its edge in a waterfall that never reaches the ground. From the summit, both the Indian and Atlantic oceans are visible at the same time.

This is your first morning: you wake up in a hostel on Kloof Street, you step outside, you look up, and there it is. That mountain. And in that moment, you understand that you are a very long way from home, on a continent you don't know yet, in a city unlike anything that exists in the northern hemisphere. That feeling — of complete disorientation and complete aliveness — is what Cape Town gives you on day one. Most people never quite recover from it. They keep coming back.

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What Kind of Place Is This, Exactly?

Cape Town is the oldest city in South Africa and one of the most geographically extraordinary cities on earth. It occupies a narrow peninsula that stretches 75 kilometres south from the city centre into the convergence zone of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans — two entirely different bodies of water that crash into each other at the Cape of Good Hope. The Atlantic side is turquoise, freezing cold, and flanked by mountains; the Indian Ocean side is warmer, wilder, and flecked with penguin colonies and great white sharks. The city is wedged between the mountain and the sea, which means that no matter where you are in Cape Town, you are always within sight of something that will stop you mid-sentence.

It is also a deeply complex city. Beautiful in a way that can make you forget, for a moment, the weight of its history and the sharpness of its present-day inequalities. The most staggering wealth in sub-Saharan Africa exists here, ten minutes' drive from some of the most overcrowded informal settlements on the continent. You will feel this tension from the moment you arrive. The right response is not to look away from it. The right response is to pay attention, ask questions, and let the city's complexity be part of what you experience rather than something you manage around.

Cape Town will challenge you. It will also absolutely thrill you. Both things will be true at the same time, every single day. Welcome.

The City's Origin Story: It Started as a Salad

Long before any European set foot here, the Cape Peninsula was home to the Khoisan people — specifically the Goringhaicona clan, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and pastoralists who called this place Hui !Gaeb: "the place where clouds gather." They had been here for thousands of years. They watched the first Portuguese ships round the cape in 1488 under Bartolomeu Dias — who named it Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms, after nearly being wrecked — and they watched more ships come, year after year, for the next 164 years. They were not consulted on what happened next.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) sent Jan van Riebeeck to the Cape with one of the most prosaic mandates in colonial history: go grow vegetables. The sea route between Europe and the spice islands of the East Indies was a four-month, scurvy-ravaged nightmare. Sailors were dying of vitamin deficiency. The Cape, roughly halfway along the route, was the logical place to build a kitchen garden, a water station, and a repair depot. Van Riebeeck wasn't supposed to colonise Africa. He was supposed to grow lettuce.

What began as a cabbage patch became, within a generation, a full colony. Settlers spread beyond the fort's boundaries. The Khoisan, who had initially traded cattle with the Dutch, found their grazing lands enclosed and their herds taken. Enslaved people were imported from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and the Dutch East Indies — a forced migration that would give Cape Town its extraordinarily diverse genetic and cultural makeup and, ultimately, its unique cuisine, its languages, and its hybrid identity. The Castle of Good Hope, completed in 1679 and the oldest surviving building in South Africa, was not built to defend against elephants. It was built to keep the enslaved population in and rival European navies out. Walk past it on the Grand Parade today and you are walking past the physical origin point of modern South Africa.

The Company's Garden — the vegetable patch that started it all — is still there, in the middle of the CBD, now a lush public park with ancient oak trees and famously fearless squirrels. It is four minutes' walk from the Long Street backpacker strip. The fact that this city's origin story sits directly alongside its party district is very Cape Town.

The Cape Malay, the Bo-Kaap, and the Language You'll Hear

One of the first things you'll notice in Cape Town is that the accent is unlike anything else in South Africa, and unlike anything else in the world. Cape Town has its own dialect of Afrikaans — and its own brand of English, heavily inflected by that Afrikaans — that reflects the city's layered history. Words like lekker (nice, good, delicious, enjoyable — a word that does everything), braai (barbecue), boet (bro), yoh (an all-purpose expression of surprise or appreciation), and eina (ouch, or "that hurts") will enter your vocabulary within 48 hours. The phrase you will hear most often, from everyone, is "shame" — which in Cape Town means approximately the opposite of what you think it means. "Ag shame" is an expression of sympathy and warmth. When a local says "shame, man" about a baby or a lost puppy, they mean something like "how sweet" or "poor thing." Do not be confused by this. It is one of the more charming linguistic features of the place.

The Bo-Kaap — the neighbourhood of steep, cobbled streets and neon-painted houses immediately above the CBD — is the historic heart of Cape Town's Cape Malay community, the descendants of the enslaved people and political prisoners brought here from the Dutch East Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The community maintained its Islamic faith through two centuries of colonial prohibition, developed its own dialect of Afrikaans (the oldest written form of the language), and created what is today called Cape Malay cuisine: the most distinctive and delicious cooking in South Africa, a fusion of Indonesian, Indian, African, and Dutch flavours. A bowl of Cape Malay curry — richly spiced with cinnamon, cardamom, and dried apricot; served over fragrant yellow rice with sambal and atchar — costs about €3 from the family-run restaurants on Wale Street and will rearrange your understanding of what a curry can be. Walk up from Long Street on a Sunday morning when the mosques are calling and the smell of koesisters (syrup-soaked twisted doughnuts) is drifting out of every other window. It is extraordinary.

Understanding the City: Five Zones, Five Worlds

Cape Town is not one city. It is a collection of sharply different neighbourhoods divided by mountains, motorways, and a history of forced racial geography. For a backpacker, understanding these zones is the difference between a good trip and a legendary one.

3D map of Cape Town showing suburbs relative to Table Mountain

The City Bowl: Where You'll Live

The City Bowl is the central valley cradled between Table Mountain, Devil's Peak, and Lion's Head. This is where the majority of backpacker accommodation sits, where the nightlife concentrates, and where you'll spend most of your time when you're not on a beach or a mountain. Long Street is the traditional backpacker artery — loud, colourful, sometimes sketchy after midnight, always alive. Kloof Street, running parallel up the slope of the mountain, is where you go for good coffee, better bars, and the feeling that Cape Town is a city that genuinely functions. Bree Street sits between them and has become the city's most interesting restaurant and craft beer strip in the last decade. The three streets form a triangle that contains more good food, good music, and good people-watching per square metre than almost anywhere else in Africa.

The Atlantic Seaboard: Where You'll Go for Sunsets

From the V&A Waterfront, the Atlantic Seaboard runs south along the base of the Twelve Apostles mountain range through Green Point, Sea Point, Bantry Bay, Clifton, and Camps Bay. This is the expensive, beautiful, slightly unreal side of Cape Town — all sundowner bars, white sand coves, and impractically attractive people. The water here is glacially cold (the Benguela Current comes directly from Antarctica), but nobody is swimming on the Atlantic Seaboard anyway; they're sitting on the rocks at Clifton with a cold beer, watching the sun go down over the ocean in colours that do not look like they belong to this planet. The Sea Point Promenade — 11km of oceanfront path — is free, endlessly social, and one of the great urban walks in the world at dusk.

Observatory ("Obs"): Where the Real City Lives

Observatory is the neighbourhood that Cape Town's creative class — musicians, artists, students, activists, people who make their own clothes and grow herbs on their windowsills — calls home. It sits on the southern slopes above the railway line, a 10-minute Uber from the City Bowl, and it looks completely different: peeling Victorian houses, independent record shops, a permanent smell of something cooking, bars with no signage and doors that open onto courtyards. The Armchair Theatre on Lower Main Road is the spiritual home of Cape Town's alternative music scene, with live bands on most nights, a firepit in the courtyard, pool tables, and a crowd that is roughly 50% local and 50% travellers who came for one drink and are still there at 1:00 AM. The Obs café strip is also the cheapest eating on the Cape Town social scene — bunny chow, biltong rolls, breakfast plates — in a neighbourhood that has not yet discovered what a flat white costs in the City Bowl.

The Northern Suburbs: Kite Country

Drive north from the city past the port and the industrial flatlands and you arrive at Bloubergstrand (translated from Afrikaans, it means "Blue Mountain Beach", a wonderfully exotic name which describes the view of Table Mountain very aptly) and Big Bay, on the western shore of Table Bay. This is where the Cape Doctor blows hardest — the fierce south-easterly wind that rakes the city from November to March — and it is, as a consequence, one of the premier kiteboarding destinations on the planet. Between December and February, the sky above Kite Beach is literally filled with hundreds of kites, the surfers below are foil-boarding at 40km/h, and the Table Mountain view across the bay is the most famous photograph in South Africa. There are beginner kite schools along the beachfront that will have you water-starting in three days. If that's not your thing, come at sunset for the view, which costs nothing.

The Southern Suburbs and False Bay: The Other Ocean

Over the mountain — through De Waal Drive or through the Southern Suburbs — lies a completely different coastline. False Bay faces east, is warmed by the Agulhas Current, and is the side of Cape Town that actually swims. Muizenberg is where South African surfing was born: a wide beach with a long, gentle right-hand break and a strip of Victorian beach huts painted in candy colours that have become one of the most reproduced images in the country. Beginners learn to surf here in the mornings. At the southern end of False Bay, Simon's Town is a Victorian naval town with a colony of 3,000 African penguins on the beach at Boulders, and Kalk Bay is a working fishing village with the best fish-and-chips in the southern hemisphere and an antique bookshop that will swallow your entire afternoon.

The Music: What's Actually Playing

You need to know this before you go out, because the music in Cape Town is not what you expect, and it is better than what you expect.

The dominant sound on Cape Town's dance floors right now is amapiano — a genre born in South African townships around 2014, built on a bed of deep log-drum bass lines, smooth piano riffs, and rolling percussion, with short, often repeated vocal hooks that sit on top like something between jazz and gospel. It is one of the most genuinely original musical forms to emerge anywhere in the world in the last decade, and it has now crossed into global mainstream consumption via streaming platforms and has been interpolated by artists from Drake to Beyoncé. But the version of amapiano that plays in Cape Town clubs — louder, harder, faster than the studio recordings — is something different again. When a Cape Town crowd is fully in it, the dance floor moves as a single organism. If you have never experienced it, prepare to be converted within approximately one song.

Alongside amapiano is gqom — Cape Town's own hard-edged adaptation of a form that originated in the Durban townships. Cape Town gqom is darker, more industrial than the Durban original, built on synths and strings layered over church hymn melodies, and has been dubbed "Emo Gqom" or "Gospel Gqom" by locals. The distinction between gqom and amapiano matters in the same way that the distinction between drum and bass and garage matters — they share a family tree, but they feel completely different on a dance floor. Coco on Loop Street is the home of the harder sound. Modular in Observatory is where the electronic and techno crowd goes. The Armchair is where anything can happen on a Friday night and usually does.

What makes Cape Town's music scene remarkable is that this is not imported culture. It came from the townships of Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and Langa — from a generation of young Black South Africans who took the electronic music tools available to them and built something that is now genuinely influencing global pop. Hearing it live in the city where it was made, in a club that mixes backpackers and Capetonians from across the city's social divides, is one of those experiences that you will want to describe to people when you get home and will find you cannot adequately.

The Elephant in the Room: Inequality

Cape Town is the most unequal city in one of the most unequal countries in the world — and South Africa has the highest Gini coefficient (the standard measure of income inequality) of any country that keeps reliable records. You will feel this in ways that are difficult to prepare for. You will eat a beautiful breakfast in a garden café in Gardens and, twenty minutes later by Uber, be driving past informal settlements that stretch to the horizon. You will walk past people sleeping in doorways on streets that are otherwise some of the most photogenic in the world. You will go on a tour led by a person your own age who grew up in a township under conditions so different from your own as to seem fictional, and they will explain this calmly and with pride and you will not quite know what to do with that information.

There is no simple way to navigate this, and no guide can tell you how to feel about it. What we can say is this: the city is not asking for your guilt. It is asking for your attention and your respect. Spend money at local businesses. Tip well and directly — service workers in Cape Town earn wages that would be considered poverty pay in most of the countries our readers come from. Book your township tours with community-based operators rather than large commercial companies. Talk to people. Don't just photograph them. The inequality is real, it is structural, and it is the product of a very specific history. Understanding even a fraction of that history will make your time in Cape Town significantly richer than if you simply enjoy the view and move on. And the view is spectacular. Both things are true.

Cape Town FAQs for Backpackers

When is the best time to go?

Cape Town summers (December–March) are long, hot, and electric. Days are 14 hours of sunlight, evenings stay warm until midnight, and the energy in the hostels and bars is at its absolute peak. The Cape Doctor wind is also at its strongest in December and January — if it is blowing hard (and it can blow hard enough to close the cable car and make beach-sitting feel like a sand-blasting), head to Clifton 4th Beach or Llandudno, which are sheltered by the mountain. January and February are the best months for the kiteboarding and surfing scene at Blouberg.

The sweet spots for backpackers are October–November and March–April: warm, mostly dry, significantly less crowded, and with hostel rates that can be 30–40% cheaper than peak season. These shoulder months are when Cape Town feels most like itself rather than a city performing for tourists.

Winter (June–August) is cool, rainy, and — for the right traveller — deeply atmospheric. The mountain is regularly in cloud, the fynbos is in flower, the whale season starts in False Bay (June–November is the prime window for southern right whales), and the hostels are quiet enough that you get the place to yourself. If you are coming for surfing, hiking, or doing the Winelands without crowds, winter is underrated.

Where should I stay?

City Bowl / Kloof Street area

The default choice, and for good reason. You are at the foot of the mountain, walking distance to the best bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and central to everything. This is where the majority of Cape Town's best backpacker accommodation sits. If you want nightlife, culture, and the social energy of people who are all going through the same disorienting first-week-in-Africa experience simultaneously, stay here.

Sea Point / Green Point

Better for active types who want to run the promenade in the morning and be near the Atlantic beaches. Slightly less central, more residential, and with a very different (calmer) energy. Some of Cape Town's best mid-range hostels are here.

Observatory

If you are staying for longer than two weeks and want to feel like you live in Cape Town rather than visit it, stay in Obs. Cheaper, more local, better music, and a bus ride from everything else. The Armchair is your living room.

Muizenberg

For surfers only. It is 45 minutes from the City Bowl without traffic and a different world entirely — small, community-focused, and built around the morning surf. If you are here to learn to surf and don't care about nightlife, this is your neighbourhood.

Blouberg / Northern Suburbs

For watersports. A great place to learn to kite surf, and with the iconic views of Table Mountain that you see in the brochures, but far from the main city action.

What does it cost to go out?

Cape Town is extraordinarily cheap by European and Australian standards. A craft beer at a Kloof Street bar: €1.50–€2.50. A cocktail at one of the nicer spots: €4–€6. Entry to most clubs: free or €2–€5. A full meal at a sit-down restaurant that would cost €25 in Amsterdam costs €8–€12 here. A Cape Malay curry from a Bo-Kaap family restaurant costs about €3. Uber across the city costs €2–€4. This gap between what you're used to paying and what things actually cost here is one of the genuinely transformative pleasures of being in Cape Town on a backpacker budget. You can afford to eat well, drink well, and experience the city properly in a way that would be impossible in London, Paris, or Sydney.

What is load shedding and will it ruin my trip?

Load shedding is South Africa's system of scheduled rolling power cuts — a consequence of decades of under-investment in Eskom, the state electricity provider. Good news: Cape Town has significantly reduced the frequency and duration of load shedding compared to the rest of the country, and in 2025 the city went through long periods of Stage 0 (no cuts) due to increased municipal renewable energy capacity. Bad news: it has not been fully eliminated, and when it does kick in, it typically runs for 2.5-hour blocks, twice a day. Download the EskomSePush app the moment you land — it will tell you exactly when and where the power will be off. Most decent hostels have inverters or generators that keep Wi-Fi and essential lighting running. It is an inconvenience, not a crisis, and most travellers barely notice it.

Getting around: Uber, bus, or hire car?

Uber and Bolt are the primary transport tools for backpackers in Cape Town, and they are ludicrously cheap. A 10-minute Uber across the City Bowl costs about €1.50. From the City Bowl to Camps Bay (a 15-minute drive with spectacular mountain views): about €3. Use Bolt to compare prices and get the better deal, especially at peak times.

MyCiTi buses are reliable, cheap, and good for the main routes along the Atlantic Seaboard and to Blouberg. They require a MyConnect card loaded with credit. Useful for getting to Camps Bay or Sea Point during the day without paying Uber surge pricing. Not useful for anything south of the CBD (Muizenberg, Simon's Town, Cape Point).

Metrorail trains: Avoid. They are unreliable, run to irregular schedules, and are not safe for tourists on most routes, particularly the Southern Line.

Hire car: Essential if you want to see the Peninsula properly — Chapman's Peak, Cape Point, the wine farms, the Boulders penguin colony, Hout Bay. Pick up at the airport (all major companies represented), drive on the left, and understand that the N2 to the airport is a road where smash-and-grab incidents happen at red lights. Keep windows up in slow traffic.

What is the Cape Doctor?

The Cape Doctor is the local name for the fierce south-easterly wind that blows through Cape Town from roughly November to March. It is named partly because it clears the city's air of pollution and partly because it is so powerful that it feels like an assault. In full force, it can throw you off your stride on the street, rip hats off heads, and make a beach afternoon miserable. But it also creates the famous "Tablecloth" — the white cloud that spills over the flat top of the mountain and cascades down the front face without ever reaching the ground, evaporating in the warmer air below. It is one of the most beautiful things you will see in Cape Town, and it happens because of the same wind that is spoiling your beach day. The Doctor can blow for three days straight or vanish overnight. Watch the mountain: if the Tablecloth is forming, head to a sheltered beach (Clifton, Llandudno) or up into the city.

Is cannabis legal?

In 2018, South Africa's Constitutional Court decriminalised the private use and personal cultivation of cannabis by adults — meaning you can legally use it in a private space such as a hostel room (if the hostel permits it). However, you cannot legally buy or sell it, and smoking in public — on the street, on the beach, in a park — remains a criminal offence. You will see pop-up "cannabis clubs" and unlicensed "dispensaries" around the City Bowl, particularly on Long Street. These operate in a legal grey area. A formal regulated retail market was still in the legislative pipeline as of early 2026. Use common sense: the law is clear on public consumption, whatever the vibe on the street suggests.

Is the tap water safe?

Yes. Cape Town's tap water is treated to a high standard and is safe to drink throughout the tourist areas of the city. You do not need to buy bottled water. That said, the city has been on recurring water-scarcity alert since the near-catastrophic "Day Zero" drought of 2017–2018, when the city came within weeks of running out of municipal water entirely. Conservation habits are embedded in local culture. Take short showers. Don't run the tap. The city will appreciate it and so will the Western Cape's increasingly stressed water catchments.

The penguins. Tell me about the penguins.

African penguins. Boulders Beach. Simon's Town. About 45 minutes' drive down the False Bay coast from the City Bowl. A colony of approximately 3,000 of them living on a public beach, completely unbothered by human presence, waddling between beach towels and nesting in the dune scrub. Yes, you can swim in the same water. Yes, they will swim alongside you and investigate your feet. No, they do not bite unless you provoke them (they do bite if you provoke them — they have a grip like a pair of pliers). The entry fee to the National Park section of the beach is small. The free section immediately adjacent to the park, reachable by walking past the navy base, gives you much the same experience without the boardwalk crowds.

While in Simon's Town: beware the baboons. The Cape Peninsula's baboon troops are legally protected, have learned that humans mean food, and have zero fear of people. If a baboon sees you carrying anything edible — or anything that looks like it might be edible, including a backpack or a shopping bag — it will take it. They are astonishingly fast and strong. Keep car windows up on the baboon-traffic sections of the road. This is not wildlife tourism; it is wildlife that has adapted completely to coexisting with tourism, which is a different and more complicated thing.

Are there sharks?

Yes, but the risk is managed and well below what the reputation suggests. The Atlantic side (Camps Bay, Clifton) is consistently too cold for sharks — the Benguela Current keeps the water at 12–16°C, which is outside the comfort zone of great whites. The False Bay side (Muizenberg, Fish Hoek) is warmer and does have great white activity; the Shark Spotters programme deploys observers on the mountain above the beach and uses a flag system visible from the water: green flag means all clear; white flag means a shark has been spotted — clear the water. In recent years, False Bay's great white population has dramatically declined — researchers believe the primary cause is a pair of orcas that moved into the area around 2017 and have since killed and eaten the livers of several great whites, causing the remaining sharks to relocate. The Cape whale watching cruises now regularly encounter these orcas. Conservation science is wild.

Safety In Cape Town

Cape Town requires a level of street awareness that most visitors from Western Europe, Scandinavia, or Australia are simply not used to. It is not a city where you switch off. That said, the majority of the tourists who pass through Cape Town every year — hundreds of thousands of them, many of them solo and in their twenties — have a completely trouble-free visit. The risks are real and manageable, not random and unavoidable. Here is what you actually need to know.

The Most Common Crime: Your Phone

Phone snatching is the number-one crime affecting tourists in Cape Town, and in 2025–2026 it has taken a new and more aggressive form: thieves on motorbikes who ride onto pavements and grab phones from hands at speed. This is happening in broad daylight in ostensibly safe areas, including Kloof Street, the V&A Waterfront vicinity, and along the Sea Point promenade. The rule is simple: keep your phone in your pocket when you are walking. Check your map before you leave, not while you walk. If you need to navigate, use your phone inside a café, a shop, or against a wall with your back protected. A moment's carelessness costs you everything — not just the phone, but the photos, the contacts, the banking apps. Use a crossbody bag with a zip, not a backpack with an external pocket.

Long Street After Midnight

Long Street is the engine of Cape Town's backpacker nightlife and it is worth every minute of it — but it is also a pickpocket corridor and a street where the "hugger mugger" technique (a stranger approaches with apparent friendliness, hugs you, and removes your wallet in the process) is common after midnight. Go, enjoy yourself, but keep your phone in a front pocket, carry only the cash you intend to spend, and — critically — do not walk the length of Long Street alone after 1:00 AM. Walk with people. Take an Uber from bar to bar after midnight rather than walking. The street is not dangerous in the way that some areas of the city are dangerous. It is pick-pocket dangerous, which is manageable with attention.

The Cape Flats: A Clear-Eyed View

The Cape Flats — the vast, flat terrain southeast of the city where the townships of Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Nyanga, Mitchells Plain, and Manenberg are located — are where the majority of Cape Town's population lives, and where South Africa's gang violence is most concentrated. It is emphatically not a place for independent tourist wandering. That said, it is home to extraordinary community life, music, food, art, and people, and visiting it through a reputable community-based tour operator is not only safe but one of the most worthwhile things you can do in Cape Town. The distinction is critical: don't go alone, don't go spontaneously, and don't go with a large commercial bus tour either. Go with a small, locally run operator whose guides are from the community you're visiting. Your hostel can recommend them. Mzoli's Place in Gugulethu — a legendary township braai restaurant that draws a mixed crowd of locals and visitors on Sundays — is the exception: a specific, well-known venue that can be visited by taxi directly, without wandering.

Table Mountain Muggings: Real And Avoidable

Muggings on Table Mountain's lower trails — particularly the paths running from the lower cable car station toward the Platteklip Gorge entrance, and the trails near Rhodes Memorial — are an established and ongoing reality. The perpetrators work in groups and target solo hikers and pairs. The solution is straightforward: hike in groups of four or more, stick to the busy main trails (Platteklip Gorge is always populated), use the SafetyMountain tracking WhatsApp group (widely used by local hikers, ask at your hostel for the current number), and do not hike alone. The muggings almost exclusively happen on isolated sections. On a busy trail with other people around, you are very unlikely to have a problem.

GPS And The N2

When driving to or from Cape Town airport (or anywhere south of the city), Google Maps may suggest routes through townships to save a few minutes. It is not aware of which roads are safe for tourists to transit at night. Stick to the N1 and N2 highways, use the R300 or the N7 as directed, and if Google Maps suggests a shortcut through Crossroads or any informal settlement at night, ignore it. In slow traffic on the N2 particularly, keep windows up and do not leave bags visible on seats.

Further Reading

Ready to map out the rest of your adventure? For more general info on backpacking South Africa, see our comprehensive home page. We also highly recommend checking out our expert backpacking advice section to make sure you stay safe and save money on the road. If you need help structuring your travel routes, take a look at our suggested itineraries for tours of South Africa. For more info on backpacking, including access to our offline app and interactive PDF guide, head over to our resources page.

Backpacking Drakensberg heraldic cartouche featuring a male and female backpacker framing a globe map of the Drakensberg, surrounded by local attractions.
LION'S HEAD HIKE - Photo: Arthur Brognoli

Things To Do In Cape Town

1. The Mountain (Non-Negotiable)

You are going to climb Table Mountain. This is not a suggestion. It is a geographical inevitability. The only question is how.

Platteklip Gorge (the classic route, 2–3 hours up)

The most popular hiking route to the summit, and for good reason — it is well-marked, consistently busy (meaning safer), and the views that open behind you as you climb are increasingly absurd. At the top, you are standing on a plateau so flat that you can play cricket on it, looking down at a city that appears to have been designed by a set designer rather than built by humans. The cable car takes you back down for about €15. Or hike down the same way in half the time.

Lion's Head Sunset Hike (the social event)

Every clear evening, hundreds of people — locals, tourists, people of every age and background — make the 1.5-hour spiral hike to the summit of Lion's Head for sunset. The path involves chains and ladders near the top, which sounds alarming and is mildly exhilarating. The summit at sunset, with the Atlantic turning gold below you and the city lights beginning to flicker on across the bowl, is one of those collective experiences that Cape Town does better than any city I can think of. On a full moon, people do it at night with headlamps. The full moon hike is, by multiple accounts, even better.

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Kasteelpoort (the quieter alternative)

If the Platteklip crowds are not your thing, Kasteelpoort approaches the summit from the Camps Bay side through a quieter, more atmospheric route with fewer other hikers and superior views of the Atlantic. It is harder — steeper and more technical in places — but the experience of emerging onto the summit plateau with nobody else around is worth the extra effort.

Abseiling the Front Face

This is the highest commercial abseil in the world, at 1,000 metres above sea level, stepping backwards off the top edge of the mountain and dropping 112 metres down the cliff face. Abseil Africa has operated this route for over 25 years with an impeccable safety record. You do not need prior experience; the guides manage everything. What you need is a willingness to lean back over a drop that your body is extremely reluctant to lean back over. The vertical perspective of the city from the cliff face — looking down between your feet at Cape Town laid out below you — is like nothing else. Cost approximately €65.

The Cable Car: The View Without the Legs.

The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway is not the lazy option. It is a completely different experience to hiking — and for good reasons, it is worth doing even if you have already climbed the mountain on foot. The car itself is a rotating cabin: as it rises the floor turns slowly through 360 degrees, so every passenger gets a full panoramic view of the city, both oceans, and the Peninsula stretching away to the south over the five-minute ascent. At the summit, the cable car drops you onto the plateau where you can walk freely across the top, look down the sheer front face, and spend as long as you like. There is a café at the top. The food is overpriced and the coffee is fine and the view from the café terrace is completely preposterous.

The practical information you actually need: the cable car does not run in high wind — and in Cape Town, high wind is a regular condition. The mountain can look perfectly clear from the city while a 60km/h south-easterly is running across the top, which means the cable car is closed for the day with no warning. Before you make the trip to the lower station, download the official Table Mountain Aerial Cableway app, which shows real-time queue length and operating status. This saves you significant frustration. Book tickets online rather than at the ticket office — the queue at the office in peak season can be two to three hours; booking online costs the same and you can go straight to the boarding area. Prices in 2026 run approximately €13–€16 return for an adult. The car closes for its annual maintenance shutdown every July/August for roughly one week; check the website for exact dates if you're visiting in that window. Finally: it is significantly colder on top of the mountain than in the city — even in midsummer, even on a cloudless day. Take a layer.

The best strategy for most backpackers: hike up via Platteklip Gorge and take the cable car down. You get the satisfaction and the views of the climb, your legs thank you on the descent, and you experience the rotating cabin. One-way down tickets are available. This is, by some margin, the most sensible approach to Table Mountain for people who are in reasonable shape but also have somewhere to be in the evening.

2. Adrenaline

Paragliding from Signal Hill

You launch from the slope of Signal Hill with a tandem pilot strapped to your back, catch the thermal rising off the mountain, and soar out over the Atlantic Seaboard — silently, at about 400 metres, with the full panorama of the Twelve Apostles on your left and the ocean on your right — before landing on the Sea Point Promenade in front of a crowd of genuinely appreciative onlookers. The flight lasts 10–20 minutes depending on conditions. It is the best way to see Cape Town from the air and is considerably less alarming than the skydive, though the skydive is also excellent (there is a drop zone up the West Coast at Langebaan where you can jump from 10,000 feet with the entire curve of the Peninsula visible below you on a clear day). Paragliding costs approximately €85 for a tandem flight; book through Fly Cape Town.

Kiteboarding at Blouberg (learn in 3 days)

The Cape Doctor makes Kite Beach at Bloubergstrand one of the most consistent kiteboarding training grounds in the world. Several IKO-certified schools operate along the beachfront and will take a complete beginner through the three-day course to water start and independent riding. Three days of lessons runs approximately €160–€200. It is one of the best investments you can make in Cape Town — you will leave with a skill that you can use on beaches across the world, and the experience of your first solo water start, with Table Mountain in the backdrop across the bay, is objectively one of the most euphoric things available in this city.

Shark Cage Diving at Gansbaai

A full-day excursion (about 2 hours from Cape Town) to Gansbaai on the Overberg coast, where you board a boat, cross to Dyer Island, and enter a suspended steel cage at water level while great white sharks investigate you from a distance of approximately one metre. The briefing makes it sound alarming. The reality is controlled, well-managed, and surreal in a way that is difficult to convey. You spend about 20 minutes in the cage over the course of the trip, interspersed with surface watching from the boat. Cost approximately €120–€140 inclusive of transport from Cape Town. Note the caveat from the sharks FAQ above: the great white population in False Bay has declined significantly since 2017, and the Gansbaai population has also been affected. The experience is still widely available, but check with your operator on recent sightings before booking.

Surfing at Muizenberg (learn in a morning)

The long, gentle, mushy right-hand wave at Muizenberg's Surfers' Corner is the most forgiving learning break in South Africa. A two-hour lesson with equipment rental runs about €25. By the end of it, you will have stood up on a wave — probably multiple times — and you will understand for the first time why surfing is a way of life for some people rather than a sport. The surf schools operate year-round. Winter (June–August) produces more consistent swell; summer is warmer and more crowded. The coloured Victorian beach huts provide the backdrop for the photograph your friends back home will assume was staged.

3. The Peninsula (The Day That Changes Everything)

Block out a full day. Get a hire car, or book the cycle-shuttle combo tour (more on this below), and do the whole thing: Cape Point, Boulders Beach, Chapman's Peak. This is the day that people talk about for years after their Cape Town trip.

The Cycle & Shuttle Tour

The definitive backpacker way to experience the Cape Peninsula. You'll probably see vehicles around the city with trailers loaded with mountain bikes — these are the Peninsula shuttle-cycle tours that a handful of operators run specifically for backpackers. The concept: they drive you over the steep and boring sections (including the brutal Suikerbossie hill) and drop you to cycle the scenic, manageable stretches — through the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve, past ostriches, baboons, and bontebok antelope, along clifftops with views that make you want to never go home. Most tours stop at Boulders Beach for the penguin colony, include a drive along Chapman's Peak (the cliffside road blasted into the mountainside above Hout Bay that is routinely listed among the most spectacular roads on earth), and cover the full southern tip from Simon's Town to Cape Point. A full day, roughly €40–€60 per person including bike hire. Book through your hostel.

Cape Point

The southernmost point of the Cape Peninsula is not, contrary to popular myth, the southernmost point of Africa (that is Cape Agulhas, about 160km to the east). But the distinction is irrelevant when you're standing on the cliff above the lighthouse at Cape Point, looking south into the Southern Ocean, with nothing but 4,000 kilometres of open water between you and Antarctica. It is a genuinely vertiginous feeling, and the landscape around it — fynbos, mountain, sea, and enormous boulders scoured by Atlantic swell — is wild in a way that the Garden Route is not. Entry to the Cape of Good Hope section of the Table Mountain National Park is approximately €12; this includes access to Cape Point.

Chapman's Peak Drive

Ten kilometres of road dynamited into the cliff face above Hout Bay in the 1920s, running between Noordhoek and Hout Bay at sea level on one side and a vertical rock face on the other. Drive it slowly, with the windows down, ideally at sunset heading south. There will be a toll (approximately €2). Pay it without complaint.

4. Free Cape Town (Zero Euros)

If your budget is tight, Cape Town is one of the best cities in the world to be broke in. Some of the finest experiences here cost nothing at all.

The Sea Point Promenade at Sunset

Eleven kilometres of paved oceanfront path along the Atlantic Seaboard. At dusk, it belongs to everyone: skateboarders, old men playing chess on fold-out chairs, families with pushchairs, runners, dog walkers, couples, and a general sociable throng of people who all seem to have silently agreed that the evening should be spent outside. The tidal pools along the promenade — wide, flat, filled by the Atlantic swell — are where local kids swim in summer. Grab a bag of braai chips from the petrol station on the corner and walk west until you run out of promenade. Free.

First Thursdays

On the first Thursday of every month, the galleries, studios, and creative spaces of the CBD and Woodstock stay open until 9:00 PM, and the streets — particularly Bree Street and the blocks around it — turn into a sprawling free street party. Food trucks, live music on the pavements, gallery openings with free wine, and an enormous, entirely mixed cross-section of Cape Town out in public together. It is one of the better social events in the country and it costs nothing to participate in.

The Company's Garden

The vegetable patch that started it all. Now a shaded public park in the CBD, free to enter, full of oak trees planted by the VOC in the 17th century, and populated by squirrels of legendary brazenness who will approach you directly and stare at your food with a level of entitlement that suggests they consider themselves the park's actual owners. Buy a bag of peanuts from the vendor at the entrance for about €0.50. Feed them out of your hand. Question your life choices. Go again tomorrow.

Kalk Bay Harbour on a Saturday Morning

Drive or take the train (the Southern Line is safe and functional during daylight hours on weekends, as far as Simon's Town) to Kalk Bay, a Victorian fishing village on the False Bay coast. The harbour empties and fills with the tides, the fishing boats come in with their catch in the morning, and the waterfront is alive with cape cormorants, kelp gulls, and the occasional fur seal. The fish-and-chip shop on the harbour wall is not fancy. It is, however, the best fish-and-chips you have ever eaten. Free to visit; lunch approximately €4.

The Old Biscuit Mill (Saturday Mornings)

Every Saturday morning from 9:00 AM, a converted Victorian biscuit factory in Woodstock — about 10 minutes from the City Bowl by Uber — fills with approximately 200 food, craft, and produce traders operating out of brightly coloured stalls under corrugated iron roofs. The Neighbourgoods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill is not a tourist market: it is the weekly social event for a significant cross-section of Cape Town's creative and professional class, and the quality and variety of the food on offer is extraordinary. The standard format is: arrive early (9:30 AM before the crowd thickens), take a lap of the whole market before committing to anything, come back to the three or four stalls that looked best, eat standing up. A full, excellent breakfast — smoked snoek pâté on rye, a pulled-pork roll, a freshly baked pastry, a flat white from a roaster who takes the craft more seriously than most — will cost you under €10. The noise, the music, the smell of everything cooking simultaneously, and the spectacle of Cape Town at leisure on a Saturday is worth the trip even if you eat nothing.

5. Nightlife: How It Actually Works

Cape Town nights run late and they run hot. The general rhythm is: sundowners somewhere with a view between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM, dinner at 8:00 PM, bars from 9:30 PM, clubs from midnight onwards, bed somewhere between 2:00 AM and whatever. Here is where to be and when.

For sundowners

Maiden's Cove on the Atlantic Seaboard (bring your own drinks, sit on the rocks above the sea, watch the mountain go orange). Or Yours Truly on Kloof Street (leafy garden bar, always buzzing, good pizza, the de facto meeting point for half of Cape Town's backpacker community on any given evening).

For dinner before the night

Bree Street for quality at reasonable prices (try Bocca for wood-fired pizza, or &Union brewpub for local craft on tap with food). The Bo-Kaap for a Cape Malay curry that will make the rest of the night feel like a bonus.

Long Street from 10:00 PM

The traditional backpacker strip. The Waiting Room, hidden above a café on Long Street (winding staircase, rooftop deck with Table Mountain views, good DJs, reliably packed), is the best single venue on the street. Mama Africa next door has live marimba bands and Cape Malay-influenced food alongside its bar, and the crowd is international and welcoming. Keep your phone in your front pocket from the moment you get out of the Uber.

For amapiano and gqom

Coco on Loop Street is the premier address for the harder, more contemporary Black South African club sound — gqom, hip-hop, amapiano. The music is excellent, the crowd is mixed and energetic, and this is where you will hear the sounds that are genuinely shaping global music right now, in the city where a large proportion of them were made. Open Thursday to Saturday from 9:00 PM.

For techno and the late crowd

Modular in Observatory runs from midnight to 6:00 AM on weekend nights, has a no-phones policy on the dancefloor (respected, enforced, and transformative — you will not miss your phone), plays serious electronic music, and attracts a crowd that is there exclusively to dance rather than to document. It is one of the best small clubs on the African continent and is regularly cited by international DJs as a highlight of southern hemisphere touring.

For a casual late night

The Armchair in Observatory, which closes when the last person leaves. Live bands until midnight, DJ sets after, a firepit outside, and a sense of informality and genuine warmth that no purpose-built club can manufacture. If you are in Cape Town for more than a week, this place will become a habit.

6. The Big Hits (Things You Must Not Skip)

Robben Island

The island in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison. The ferry leaves from the V&A Waterfront; the tour takes a half day. The tour guides are former political prisoners. Not acting, not presenting. They are people who were locked up in that place, who walk you through the cells and the courtyard, and who tell you what happened in a tone that is simultaneously matter-of-fact and completely devastating. The lime quarry, where Mandela worked alongside his fellow prisoners and where the UV reflected off the white rock damaged his eyesight permanently, is still there, unchanged. The quarry wall where political prisoners hid notes and letters is still there. Mandela's cell — tiny, with a sleeping mat and a bucket — is preserved exactly as it was. This is not comfortable tourism. It is necessary tourism. Book in advance; it sells out frequently. Cost approximately €20.

Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens

Three things that will happen to you at Kirstenbosch: you will feel calmer than you have felt since arriving in Africa; you will try and fail to photograph a sunbird that keeps moving too fast; and you will walk across the Boomslang Canopy Walkway — a steel and timber serpent that winds up into the treetops of the garden's indigenous forest — and feel like you are a character in a film with an unrealistically good location budget. Kirstenbosch sits on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, which means that every path through it faces the mountain at close range. In summer, outdoor concerts happen on the main lawn on Sunday evenings. If there is a Sunday afternoon concert while you're in Cape Town, go. Cost to enter approximately €8. Concerts extra.

The Ocean Kayak from Sea Point

Paddle out from Three Anchor Bay in Sea Point with a guided group and spend two hours at eye level with the Atlantic — looking up at the Twelve Apostles rather than at them from below, and frequently encountering Cape fur seals, dolphins, and the occasional sunfish in open water. The perspective on the city from a kayak 500 metres offshore is unlike anything available on land. Several operators run morning and sunset trips; morning is best for flat water. Cost ~€35–€45.

The Winelands: Franschhoek Wine Tram

An hour east of the city, through the Boland Mountains, the Franschhoek valley is a cluster of wine estates in a setting that looks like it was transplanted from Tuscany but smells like fynbos. The Wine Tram — a hop-on-hop-off vintage tram system that connects the valley's estates — is the most social and most boozy way to experience it: you buy a day pass (approximately €20), board the tram at the village, get off at whichever estate looks good, taste as much as the tasting fee covers (typically €6–€10 per estate), reboard, repeat. The estates range from enormous, slick operations to family farms with dogs that accompany you through the vineyard. By mid-afternoon the tram tends to contain a lot of people who have significantly improved their opinions of South African wine. Take an Uber home. Do not attempt to drive.

Whale Watching at Hermanus (June–November)

Between June and November, southern right whales migrate from Antarctica to the warm, sheltered bays of the Western Cape to calve and mate. The focal point for this migration is Walker Bay at Hermanus, a small coastal town about 90 minutes' drive east of Cape Town along the N2. Hermanus has been recognised by the WWF as one of the twelve best whale-watching destinations in the world, and the reason is simple: the water in Walker Bay stays deep very close to shore, which means the whales — 15-metre, 60-tonne animals — swim in close enough to observe from cliff paths without any boat at all. In peak season (September–October, when the male population arrives for mating), it is not unusual to watch 20 or 30 whales simultaneously from the 12-kilometre cliff path that runs the length of the town. The town employs the world's only Whale Crier — a person who walks the cliff path and blows a kelp horn to alert visitors when whales are within sight of a particular viewing point. This sounds eccentric and is, in fact, extremely useful.

For the full experience, book a two-hour boat tour with Southern Right Charters from Hermanus New Harbour (approximately €35–€45 per person). At water level, alongside an animal the length of a bus that surfaces to breathe three metres from the boat and shows absolutely no concern about your presence, the scale of a southern right whale becomes physically comprehensible in a way that cliff-path watching cannot convey. The operators maintain a 99% sighting success rate during the June–November window and offer a refund policy if whales are not seen. Combine Hermanus with a morning stop at the wine estates of Hemel-en-Aarde valley immediately behind the town — the pinot noir from this valley is some of the finest in South Africa, and the tasting rooms are small and unhurried in a way that Franschhoek, 40 minutes closer to Cape Town, is no longer.

7. Live Sport

South Africa takes sport with a seriousness that borders on religious, and Cape Town has three world-class live sport experiences that are genuinely worth going out of your way for, regardless of how closely you follow these sports at home. The atmosphere at a packed South African sporting event — the noise, the colour, the collective intensity — is one of those things that you understand only by being inside it.

Rugby at DHL Stadium (September–May)

The Stormers are Cape Town's professional rugby franchise, competing in the United Rugby Championship (URC) — the elite club competition that includes teams from South Africa, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy, and South Africa — and the Champions Cup (the European club knockout competition). They are the reigning URC champions and consistently one of the best club sides in the world. Their home ground is DHL Stadium in Green Point, the 55,000-seat arena built for the 2010 FIFA World Cup and situated between Signal Hill and the Atlantic Ocean with a view of the mountain from the upper tiers that is frankly too good for a rugby match. Home games run roughly fortnightly between September and May. Tickets via Ticketmaster start from approximately €8–€12 for general stands, and the atmosphere when the ground is full — which it regularly is for derbies against South African rivals or visiting European clubs — is extraordinary. The crowd sings. The whole crowd. If a Springbok test match is scheduled at DHL Stadium during your visit, this escalates significantly: South Africa are the current back-to-back Rugby World Cup holders and test match atmosphere here is among the best in the world. Check the schedule before you arrive and prioritise this if there is any match within your travel window.

Cricket at Newlands (October–March)

Newlands Cricket Ground in the southern suburb of Newlands is, by general agreement, the most beautiful cricket ground in the world. Table Mountain and Devil's Peak form the direct backdrop behind the bowler's arm. The mountain is so close and so large that it dominates the entire visual field of the ground in a way that makes playing cricket here feel simultaneously intimate and absurd. Established in 1888, the ground has hosted more historic test matches than any other venue on the African continent. The modern cricket calendar at Newlands includes Proteas international fixtures (test matches, ODIs, and T20Is against touring sides), the SA20 — South Africa's franchise T20 league, now one of the best-attended and most competitive T20 competitions in the world — and domestic fixtures. The SA20 season runs January–February. International test matches are typically December–January. The grass embankment tickets are the cheapest option (approximately €3–€6) and offer an entirely different experience to the stands: you bring a blanket, buy a beer at the concourse, sit on the bank in the sunshine with Table Mountain behind the play, and spend a very good afternoon. For big international matches, book in advance — Newlands sells out for Proteas test days.

Football at DHL Stadium (year-round, PSL season August–May)

Cape Town City FC is the city's Premier Soccer League club, playing their home matches at DHL Stadium. South African football does not have the same global profile as the rugby and cricket, but the PSL is a competitive and well-attended league, and the big fixture everyone in Cape Town wants a ticket for is when Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates — the two most supported clubs in the country, both based in Johannesburg — visit. These games fill the stadium with a volume and atmosphere that rivals anything in European football: vuvuzelas, drums, chanting from multiple directions, the particular electric chaos of 40,000 South Africans watching football. Home derby tickets are available through Ticketmaster; general admission runs approximately €5–€10. Cape Town Spurs (formerly Ajax Cape Town) play in the lower-tier NFD at Athlone Stadium on the Cape Flats — a rawer, more local experience for the right traveller who wants to be somewhere genuinely different to a tourist-comfortable venue.

Top-Rated Cape Town Tours on GetYourGuide.com

Photo: GetYourGuide.com

Lion's Head or Table Mountain Hike

From ZAR765
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Table Mountain, Penguins & Cape Point

From ZAR893
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48-Hour Hop-on, Hop-off City Tour

From ZAR373
Photo: GetYourGuide.com

Robben Island / Nelson Mandela Tour

From ZAR1,280
Photo: GetYourGuide.com

Tandem Paragliding Adventure

From ZAR1,750
Photo: GetYourGuide.com

City Scenic Helicopter Tour

From ZAR2,650
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