Cape Town with Kids: What Works at Every Age

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.

A toboggan on a steel track, 1.25 kilometres of twists, turns and drops, and a brake lever you control yourself. That last part is the whole appeal. Nothing is deciding your speed for you, so the same track can be a gentle roll or a fast one depending entirely on how much you leave the lever alone, and two people on the same run can have completely different afternoons.

Africa’s first downhill tobogganing track, and still a straightforward proposition. A run takes a few minutes, which makes it the sort of thing you do several times rather than once. Riders need to be at least three, and three to seven year olds ride with an adult of fifteen or older, so the youngest are on the track rather than watching from a fence. It is outdoors and on a steel rail, so the track may close in wet weather.

Strawberry picking is what Polkadraai is known for, and it is worth being precise about it, because it runs from September to January and not the rest of the year. In season you walk the rows and fill your own punnet, which takes twenty to thirty minutes and is the rare farm activity where the doing and the eating are the same thing. Bad weather can interrupt it.

Outside the picking months the farm keeps working, and so does everything else on it. Mini golf, pedal karts, tractor rides, pony rides and a bike park stay open year round. The playground is split by age, with a toddler section for one to five year olds and a junior section for five to twelve, which sounds like a small detail until you have watched a four-year-old try to keep up with ten-year-olds on the same equipment.

The SAS Assegaai spent its working life underwater and now sits on land at Cole Point, which means you can walk through a Cold War submarine without getting wet. It is a strange and specific hour. The interior has not been prettied up for visitors, so you move through it the way the crew did, sideways past machinery, ducking through bulkheads, in spaces built for equipment first and people second.

What lands hardest is the scale. Boats like this carried a crew for weeks at a time in a hull you can touch both sides of, and no amount of reading about submarine service prepares you for standing inside one. Tours are guided and run every twenty to thirty minutes, so there is rarely much waiting. There is a display area and a Garden of Remembrance alongside if you want longer than the hour the tour itself takes.

Most zipline operations are built beside a road. This one is not. A 4x4 carries small groups up into the Hottentots Holland Nature Reserve before anything starts, and by the time the first cable is in front of you the reserve has closed around the group properly, with mountain valleys, waterfalls and fynbos underneath rather than a car park.

Allow about four and a half hours for a full group, including that transfer and a kilometre of walking out at the end. The walk is worth knowing about in advance, because it is the part that catches out anyone expecting a theme park. The tour is unusually open about who it takes: children from five can ride, younger ones tandem with a guide, and there is no upper age limit. Closed shoes with grip are required rather than suggested. It is weather dependent, and when conditions cancel a tour the operator reschedules or refunds rather than pressing on.

A gravity scooter is a heavy-framed thing with fat tyres, proper brakes and no engine, and the point of it is that the mountain does the work. You are fitted with a helmet and gloves, briefed, and then you ride down, which on Table Mountain means a long descent with the city arranging itself underneath you the whole way. It takes about an hour and a half to two hours from briefing to finish.

It asks less of you than it looks like it does. Anyone who can ride and balance a bicycle can drive a scooter, and the guided pace means you are not racing anything. The useful part for a group is that children from four to nine can come along as passengers with an adult rather than driving their own, so the age floor for joining the ride is considerably lower than the age floor for riding solo. Tours run Tuesday to Sunday.