Cape to Kruger

The cable car to Table Mountain rotates as it climbs, so everyone gets the full sweep. The city below, Robben Island offshore, the two oceans meeting at the Cape. Go on a clear morning; the 'tablecloth' of cloud rolls in fast and they close the car in wind. Up top it's a short walk to the edge and a long way down.

There is a colony of African penguins at Boulders Beach near Simon's Town. Actual penguins, on a white-sand beach, braying like donkeys, which is why they were once called jackass penguins. Chapman's Peak Drive to get there hangs off the cliff above the sea. Cape Point, where the guidebooks say the oceans meet, is the windy end of the peninsula.

Hermanus claims the best land-based whale watching in the world, and in the southern winter and spring the southern right whales come into the bay close enough to watch from the cliff path with no boat at all. There's a man with a kelp horn who blows it when one surfaces. Even off-season the coast road down is worth the drive.

The dawn drive in Kruger is cold in the open vehicle until the sun clears the bush, and then it doesn't matter, because the ranger has cut the engine fifteen metres from a lion at a waterhole and nobody is breathing. The Big Five is a checklist; the thing that stays with you is how ordinary the animals are about you being there.