Cape Town Activities
Romantic Things to Do in Cape Town: Ten Experiences for Two
Cape Town does romance particularly well, but not only in the candlelight-and-champagne sense. Some of the best experiences for two involve leaving the ground, getting onto the water, climbing down a mountain or simply spending a day somewhere neither of you has been before.
These ten activities are for couples who want to do something together rather than simply book another table for two. There are big-occasion experiences, adventurous ones, slower days and a few that are memorable precisely because they are difficult to reproduce anywhere else.
For the big occasion
The experiences you book when the day itself matters, whether that means a honeymoon, an anniversary or simply deciding this trip deserves something exceptional.
From above
Helicopter Rides
Cape Town explains itself from the air in a way it never quite does from the ground. Flights lift off from the helipad at the V&A Waterfront and the city arranges itself at once, the bowl held between the mountain and the bay, Lion’s Head and the Twelve Apostles falling away to the Atlantic, and the beaches of the seaboard strung out in order below.
Routes are sold by where they go rather than by the clock, running from about twelve minutes over Table Bay to close to an hour around the full Peninsula and Cape Point. Flights need a minimum of two passengers, and weights are taken at booking because every aircraft has per-seat limits. Wind is the usual reason a flight does not go, and when conditions are marginal the route is sometimes changed rather than the flight cancelled.
At sunrise
Hot Air Ballooning
Ballooning is the quietest way to see the Cape. There is no engine and no sense of speed, only the burner overhead and the Winelands moving slowly underneath, with vineyards and farmland coming up out of the half light and Table Mountain often visible in the distance.
Flights go at sunrise and at no other time, so the morning starts in the dark and the meeting time shifts through the year with the sun. About an hour is spent in the air. Balloons drift with the wind rather than steering, so no two flights follow the same line over the valley. Calm air is the whole requirement, which is why reschedules are common and flexible dates help.
For adventurous couples
Less candlelight, more shared nerves. These work because both of you are doing something, not because somebody has labelled the package romantic.
Step over the edge
Table Mountain Abseiling, Cape Town Abseil
You reach it the easy way, by cableway, and then walk a few minutes along the top to a ledge where the mountain simply stops. The drop is 112 metres down the cliff face below the upper station, which makes it one of the world’s highest commercial abseils. Camps Bay sits directly beneath you and the Twelve Apostles run away to the south.
No experience is needed. Briefing, descent and the walk back up take about an hour between them. The first few steps backwards over the edge are the hardest part of the whole thing. Once the rope has your weight it becomes slow and oddly calm, and you have time to look at what is underneath you rather than simply survive it. It suits anyone who wants a real mountain experience without a climbing background, and it fits neatly into a day when the cableway is already on the list.
Get on the water
Sea Kayaking
A two-seater sea kayak sits low enough that the coast stops being scenery and becomes the thing you are inside. Two hours out of Simon’s Town, Hout Bay or Three Anchor Bay puts you alongside cliffs and kelp at the waterline, at a pace that lets you look properly. The boats are stable, the kayaks, paddles and buoyancy aids are supplied, and no experience is needed.
Wildlife is the reason many people go and the reason nobody can promise anything. Penguins and seals share this water and often come to see what you are, but they are not a scheduled attraction. Wind decides the day more than anything else, which is why morning departures are the most reliable and why a trip is called off rather than pushed through. Children paddle with an adult, so the front seat is available from young.
For a slow, scenic day
Experiences with enough space around them to talk, look around and let the day take longer than strictly necessary.
Sunset and sea
V&A Waterfront Boat Cruise
The Waterfront is where Cape Town meets its own harbour, and the quickest way to understand that relationship is to get out onto the water for half an hour. There is no single right cruise here. A thirty-minute loop around the working harbour is a different proposition from an hour along the seaboard, and a sunset sailing is different again, which is the point rather than a complication.
What they share is the view back. Seen from the water the city finally arranges itself: Table Mountain standing behind the buildings, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill off to the side, the whole bowl of it legible at once in a way no street corner manages. Cruises run year round and ask nothing of you physically, which makes this one of the few things on any Cape Town list that works equally well for everybody in a group. Rough seas can keep a boat inside the harbour or move a departure.
Ride the beach
Noordhoek Beach Ride, Imhoff Equestrian Centre
The ride leaves the stables at Imhoff Farm, crosses the wetlands behind the dunes and comes out onto the long open sand of Noordhoek Beach. Ninety minutes at walking pace, in groups of no more than five. It is not a lesson and it is not a canter along the surf, it is a long quiet look at one of the best beaches in the country from the only vantage point that suits it.
Riders of all levels are taken, and the walking pace is what makes that possible. The beach ride itself has a minimum age of twelve. Children of eleven and under are not on it, but the stables run a separate fifteen-minute pony ride for them, which has to be arranged in advance so that a pony and a leader are there. The two are different products rather than versions of the same one, and it is worth knowing which you have booked.
A day in the Winelands
Franschhoek Wine Tram
Franschhoek’s estates are spread along a valley, which normally means somebody has to drive. The Wine Tram takes that decision off the table. You choose one of five colour-coded lines and hop on and off along it at your own pace, moving between estates by tram and tram-bus instead of by car.
Which estates you can reach depends entirely on the line you pick, so the choice is made before you arrive rather than on the day. Departures run from either the Franschhoek terminal or the Groot Drakenstein terminal depending on the line, and it is worth allowing at least three hours. Between mid-May and mid-September only certain lines run on weekdays.
For couples who want something different
The ones that make better stories afterwards because they are specific to the place rather than interchangeable with a night out anywhere else.
Take the sidecar
Vintage Sidecar Tours, Cape Sidecar Adventures
What separates this from any other guided road tour is where you sit. An accredited driver takes the handlebars and you ride in the sidecar bucket or pillion behind, so the coast road arrives at eye level with nothing in front of you. A leather jacket, helmet, goggles and bandana are handed over before you leave.
Cape Sidecar Adventures has run restored CJ750 and Ural sidecars in Cape Town since 2004. Routes run two hours for the Atlantic Seaboard and city loops, three for the mini-Peninsula, four for a half day and eight for a full day in the Peninsula or the Winelands. Pick-up is from the depot, the V&A Waterfront or any City Bowl address. The bikes are open to the weather, so if rain looks likely the ride moves to another date or goes ahead with the wet-weather gear carried on board, decided the day before.
Cook together
Cape Malay Cooking Class
Bo-Kaap is the obvious photograph and the least interesting way to understand the place. The houses are painted, the streets are steep, and most visitors leave having recorded the colours without learning anything about the people living behind them. A cooking class turns that around, because you spend the time in somebody’s kitchen rather than on their street.
The food is a history lesson that happens to be worth eating. Cape Malay cooking carries centuries of forced migration, trade and adaptation in its spice cupboard, and what came out of it is neither Indian nor Indonesian nor quite anything else. It belongs to this city specifically. You do the work under instruction, and then everyone sits down and eats what they made, which is a considerably better way to spend a slow afternoon than another museum queue.
Dinner in somebody’s living room
Jazz Safari, Coffeebeans Routes
Coffeebeans Routes has run this as a private evening for years. You are collected from your hotel and taken to a jazz musician’s house for a home cooked dinner and a set played in the room you are sitting in.
After that it is either a second musician’s home for a drink or a jazz venue for the late set, and then back to your hotel. It is one of the few things in Cape Town that puts a visitor inside somebody’s living room rather than in an audience.
Make it yours
The best experience for two is rarely the one somebody else has labelled the most romantic. Choose the thing that sounds most like the two of you, whether that means sunrise over the Winelands, a sidecar around the Peninsula or discovering that one of you is considerably calmer hanging from a mountain than the other.
Cape Town gives you enough range to make the day personal. Book the experiences that depend on availability or weather, leave some room around them, and let the rest of the trip happen in between.
Browse all Cape Town activities
Or start with the ten activities every first-time visitor should see