What to Do in Cape Town When It Rains

The premise is in the name. Two oceans meet near the bottom of this continent and the aquarium is organised around that fact, with the cold Atlantic on one side and the warmer Indian Ocean on the other, holding thousands of animals between them. It is a far better argument for the Cape’s marine biology than any amount of coastline driving.

The Kelp Forest is the exhibit people remember. Cape Town’s kelp is a genuine underwater landscape and seeing it in a tank tall enough to stand in explains a coastline most visitors only ever look at from above. The Ocean Exhibit, the penguin feedings and the touch pools do the rest. Two to three hours is about right, and weekday mornings are noticeably calmer than weekend afternoons. It is fully accessible and open every day of the year.

The building would be worth the visit on its own. A disused grain silo on the Waterfront was cut through its middle to make an atrium shaped like the grain that once filled it, leaving a carved concrete cathedral where forty two storage tubes used to be. Very little else in Cape Town rewards simply standing still and looking up.

The collection is contemporary African art, shown in changing exhibitions rather than a fixed hang, which means the museum is different on a second visit in a way most are not. Two to three hours covers the galleries and the atrium without rushing either. It opens daily with last entry half an hour before closing, and it is wheelchair accessible throughout.

District Six was a working neighbourhood of about sixty thousand people until it was declared a white area and demolished, and its residents were moved out to the sand flats beyond the city. The museum occupies the old Methodist church on Buitenkant Street, close enough to the ground it describes that you can walk out and stand on it afterwards.

It is a small museum and a deliberately personal one. It was opened in 1994 and built out of what former residents remembered, their street signs, their floor plans, their names written onto a canvas laid across the floor. Former residents lead the tours and the site walks. One to two hours is enough time, though most people find they are quieter afterwards than they expected to be.

On one night in 1967 a team at Groote Schuur took a heart from a young woman killed on a Cape Town road and put it into a man who was dying, and the operation worked. The museum is inside the hospital, in the original theatres, and it has resisted turning that night into a single-surgeon legend.

What it does instead is reconstruct the hours around the operation and give the credit out properly, to the theatre staff, the technicians and the two families whose consent made it possible. The rooms are recreated closely enough to feel like a place of work rather than a display. Tours are guided and run to fixed times, so this is one to plan around rather than drop into, and you should allow an hour and a half to two hours.

This is not the school-trip planetarium of memory, with a dusty star projector and a recorded voice. It is a full dome digital theatre, which means the whole ceiling is a screen and the thing being projected is not limited to the night sky. Iziko describes it as the most advanced digital planetarium on the African continent.

Shows run to a published programme from Tuesday to Sunday and tickets are separate from the museum next door, which catches people out. Allow about an hour for a show. It is the rare indoor option that genuinely works for a mixed group, because a good dome film holds an adult’s attention as easily as a child’s, and nobody has to pretend to be enjoying it for somebody else’s sake.

The Baxter belongs to the University of Cape Town and behaves like a working theatre rather than a visitor attraction, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about. It runs several stages at once, so drama, dance, comedy and classical music can all be on in the same week, and the audience is largely local.

That makes it a different proposition from the things most visitors are pointed towards. You are not watching a show built for tourists, you are going to the theatre in the city you happen to be in. It is an evening answer rather than an afternoon one, and what is actually on changes constantly, so the programme is the thing to check before you plan an evening around it.