Breaching whales, great whites, penguin colonies, forest lagoons — the coast outside your place is one of the richest stretches of ocean on earth. Here is how we would spend it, starting in our own home town.
Our home town — we book all Gansbaai activities for you at no extra cost. Tell us what you want to see, and we arrange the operator, the time and the pick-up while you unpack. You pay the operator's standard rate; the phone calls are on us.
Gansbaai is the shark diving capital of the world. Drop into a surface cage in the channel between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock and meet great whites, bronze whalers and sevengills on their own terms — no diving licence needed.
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From June to November southern right whales calve in Walker Bay, often metres from the De Kelders rocks. Watch free from the shore or get alongside them on a licensed boat.
Slip into the shallows with hundreds of curious Cape fur seals. They twist, blow bubbles and nibble fins — the friendliest wildlife encounter on the coast.
One cruise past Dyer Island can tick off whale, shark, seal, penguin and dolphin — the Marine Big 5. Skippers read the bay daily, so every trip is different.
Climb the 1895 lighthouse that guards the reef which sank the HMS Birkenhead — the wreck that gave the world "women and children first".
Walk the cliff path to Klipgat Cave, home to 70,000-year-old human history, then stay for the best free show in town: the sun dropping into Walker Bay.
Geyser Rock holds a raucous colony of some 60,000 Cape fur seals. Hear them — and smell them — from the boat as the pups porpoise around the bow.
Meet rescued African penguins up close at the APSS rehabilitation centre and watch the team ready them for release back into the wild. Free entry — donations welcome.
Just outside Gansbaai, Afrikanos puts you in the water with Nile crocodiles — mask and second skin supplied, dives at 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00. Not swimming? Take the guided pond tour instead and watch them from the deck and the underwater viewing cave.
Gansbaai belongs to its tortoises as much as to its people. Angulate tortoises — the little domed ones with the yellow-and-black shells — live right through the town and the fynbos around it, and the whole community looks after them. They are a protected species: you may not pick one up to keep, move one far from where you found it, or take one home.
If one is crossing the road, wait, or lift it gently across in the direction it was already walking and put it down off the tar. Never turn it around — it will simply set off again.
Angulate tortoises are seen daily on the roads and verges around Gansbaai.
Sea turtles pass along this coast too — loggerheads, greens and the occasional leatherback riding the Agulhas current. Cold snaps wash tiny hatchlings up on the beaches in the winter months.
If you find one on the sand, do not put it back in the water. Keep it dry, out of the sun and away from people, and call us or the nearest turtle rescue network so it can be collected and rehabilitated properly.
Turtles are a regular sight on boat trips out of the harbour.
Phone, WhatsApp or email us with the activity and your dates. We confirm with the operator, arrange pick-up from your place and send everything back in writing — usually within the hour.
No booking fees — you pay the operator's standard rate, nothing more.
Leave Cape Town on the R44 and the coast unrolls one town at a time — Rooi-Els, Pringle Bay, Betty's Bay, Kleinmond, then Hermanus, Stanford and our own Gansbaai. Carry on past Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, and the N2 takes you east through Swellendam to Mossel Bay, George, Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. Roughly 550 km end to end — you could drive it in a day, but nobody sensible does.
Cape Town to Plettenberg Bay — the Whale Coast on the R44 and R43, then the Garden Route on the N2. Gansbaai, our home town, sits at the heart of it.
Every drive below starts at our front door in Gansbaai. The near ones fill a morning; the Garden Route ones deserve a night in one of our places along the way.
Kilometres of flat sand on the warm side of False Bay — the water here is noticeably kinder than the Atlantic beaches on the other side of the peninsula, which is why Cape Town families have been coming to Strand for a century. There is a long beachfront promenade to walk, a tidal pool for small children, and the Hottentots Holland mountains standing over the whole bay. Next door in Gordon's Bay, Bikini Beach is one of the Cape's Blue Flag beaches and the harbour is where Clarence Drive begins.
The 22 km between Gordon's Bay and Rooi-Els is the finest stretch of tar in the country, and it is the road you arrive on. Cut into the cliffs above False Bay, it was begun in 1940 and finished by Italian prisoners of war, and it is named after Jack Clarence, who owned land at Hangklip and pushed for it to be built. Pull into the laybys: whales below you from June to November, Table Mountain and the whole Cape Peninsula across the water, surfers at Kogel Bay, and baboons who will go through an unattended car. Take it slowly — the corners are sharp and the view is the point.
Stony Point holds one of only two mainland colonies of African penguins — a boardwalk takes you within metres of the burrows. Add the Harold Porter botanical garden, the Kleinmond lagoon and the wild coastal walks of the Kogelberg, the greenest corner of the fynbos kingdom.
The best land-based whale watching in the world happens from a 12 km cliff path that runs right through town — listen for the whale crier's kelp horn. Then head up the Hemel-en-Aarde valley for pinot noir, or off Rotary Drive under a paraglider for the full sweep of Walker Bay.
A Victorian village on the Klein River where the pace drops to a river cruise — sundowner boats drift past fish eagles and kingfishers. Come on a Saturday for the village market, and leave with cheese, craft beer and half the back seat full of preserves.
Stand at the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Indian and Atlantic oceans officially meet. A boardwalk winds over the dunes to the stone marker, and the 1848 lighthouse — the country's second oldest — still turns overhead.
The Garden Route starts here, and Mossel Bay is where South Africa's written history starts too. The Dias Museum complex holds a full-size replica of the caravel Bartolomeu Dias sailed in 1488, and beside it stands the Post Office Tree — the milkwood where a letter was left in a shoe in 1501, making it the country's first post office. Climb the 1864 Cape St Blaize lighthouse, the only one in the southern Cape open to the public, walk the St Blaize trail along the cliffs, swim at Santos (the coast's only north-facing beach), or visit the Pinnacle Point caves where 162,000-year-old evidence of modern human behaviour was found. Then wind up the Outeniqua foothills to George for golf, forest and the old mountain passes.
Kayak up the Touw River under a canopy of forest, then paddle the lakes that string Wilderness to Sedgefield. Kingfishers on the banks, paragliders off the dunes, and a Saturday farmers' market at Wild Oats that locals set alarms for.
A lagoon town built around one dramatic gap in the cliffs — the Knysna Heads. Cruise out to the western Head at sunset, eat oysters where they were raised, and lose an afternoon in the Knysna forest where the last Cape elephants roam.
Hike the Robberg peninsula — a 4 km circuit past a seal colony, shipwreck sand spit and Nelson Bay Cave — then watch bottlenose dolphins surf the point below. Keurbooms lagoon and the Garden Route's blondest beaches finish the day.
Between Cape Town and Plettenberg Bay the mountains start about twenty minutes from the sea. Here is what to do on the days you have had enough salt water.
One of the New7Wonders of Nature and the reason most people fly to Cape Town in the first place. The cable car turns through a full circle on the way up so everybody gets the view, and the trip takes about five minutes; walkers take the Platteklip Gorge path instead, one to three hours straight up. Maclear's Beacon on the plateau is 1 086 m, and the fynbos up there holds more plant species than the whole of Britain.
The Cape Canopy Tour runs 13 platforms, a swing bridge and slides of over 300 m through a Cape Nature reserve in the Elgin Valley — pristine mountain fynbos under your feet, and no ocean in sight.
The Garden Route's canopy tour glides you from platform to platform high in the indigenous forest, guides pointing out 700-year-old outeniqua yellowwoods below.
Follow the R320 out of Hermanus into a valley famous for cool-climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, plus Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah blends and Cap Classique. Most estates pour with a mountain view and a kitchen attached.
Stanford is ten minutes from Gansbaai and pours wine, craft beer and gin along one short road. Bot River and the Elgin Valley add cool-climate whites and some of the country's best apple cider.
The youngest wine region on this drive sits just off the N2 at The Crags, and it is known for Méthode Cap Classique — sparkling wine made the way Champagne is, tasted on a deck over the vines.
Bloukrans Bridge drops 216 m to the river on the N2 at the Tsitsikamma. It has been jumped since 1990 and still holds the record as the highest commercial bridge bungy anywhere. Watching from the viewing deck is free.
Over the Outeniqua Pass and inland to the Klein Karoo: a guided walk through vast limestone chambers at the Cango Caves, then an ostrich farm and the Cango Wildlife Ranch on the way back.
Birds of Eden is the largest single-span aviary in the world; next door Monkeyland lets free-roaming primates come to you, and the Knysna Elephant Park down the road is a walk-with-them affair rather than a ride.
Turn inland anywhere along the coast and the road climbs: Tradouw, Montagu, Outeniqua, Prince Alfred's. Route 62 runs parallel to the N2 through farm stalls, padstals and mountain villages if you want the long way home.
Base yourself in furnished TMR guest accommodation for the week — or make the coast home for good with a long-term rental. Either way, the whales are included.
