Cape of High Hopes

The best way to arrive in Cape Town is unquestionably by sea, with Table Mountain, Devil's Peak, Lion's Head and all the rugged spine of the Cape Peninsula coming up over the horizon. When I came home by train from boarding school, an 18-hour journey from the interior, the flat-topped mountain would float above the vineyards and pines for the last 50 miles. We never went away during the school holidays: when you lived in Cape Town, why would you bother?

The best way to arrive in Cape Town is unquestionably by sea, with Table Mountain, Devil's Peak, Lion's Head and all the rugged spine of the Cape Peninsula coming up over the horizon. When I came home by train from boarding school, an 18-hour journey from the interior, the flat-topped mountain would float above the vineyards and pines for the last 50 miles. We never went away during the school holidays: when you lived in Cape Town, why would you bother?

Now, like almost every overseas visitor, I was arriving by air. Cape Town International is out on the Cape Flats, the windswept, sandy waste that used to be at the bottom of the sea when the peninsula was an island. This was where apartheid dumped the inhabitants of the city who were deemed the wrong colour, and the gaps between the miserable "locations" built for them are filling up with shanties as the end of restrictions on movement brings a new flood of migrants to the cities.

As you drive into town, you pass between the cooling towers of Parow power station and the insistent odours of a sewage farm. No more unromantic approach to the Fairest Cape, as Sir Francis Drake called it, could be imagined. Its only virtue is that you cannot forget, as so many would like to do, that you are in a country and a continent ravaged by past inhumanities and present inequalities.

Cape Town, down on the south-western tip of Africa, always seemed a little bit apart, even before the lunacies of segregation isolated South Africa from the rest of the world. Its climate is Mediterranean, its racial mix different from the rest of the country. And it was not until I had travelled the rest of the world that I realised how unique its natural beauties are. Those lucky enough to drive in to work below the peaks known as the Twelve Apostles can rest assured that Big Sur, to which they have been compared, cannot compete. The suburban train line along the False Bay coast, only feet above the rocks and the waves, beats the journey from Saint-Raphaël to Cannes any day.

I took it all for granted when I was growing up here. In Fishhoek, where I first went to school, we surfed all day on rubberised canvas airbeds which chafed the insides of our arms raw, oblivious to the sting of salt water in the scrapes as we caught wave after wave. We had no idea that soft white sandy beaches like this are not standard issue. Nor did it occur to us that in most places you cannot drive up and over a mountain saddle like Kloof Nek or Constantia Nek and enjoy a picnic with postcard views, or expect to pluck lobsters from the rocks when you go snorkelling.

We were equally oblivious, of course, to our privilege. The stark racial antagonisms of further north seemed muted in the Cape Town of my youth, where black South Africans were outnumbered by mixed-race "Coloureds". When the neighbours' parents would not let them play in the street with Coloured kids, we put it down to snobbery rather than racism. But even we could not fail to notice when they segregated the buses. The relatively liberal city council tried to fight back for a while by designating one row of seats for "all races", but it didn't last long.

And after the buses, it was people's homes. One by one, Coloured enclaves were cleared out in the leafier parts of the city - literally, because trees can only grow tall close to the mountains, where there is shelter from the south-easterly gales - and the inhabitants dumped in the treeless Cape Flats. Finally, they demolished District Six: poor, vice-ridden, vibrant, it was a challenge to the certainties of apartheid, and it could not survive. But nobody was shameless enough to build on the empty space left, and although the first few families have just been given back the properties they were forced to leave, it remains a hole in the city's heart.

The ghost of District Six, preserved in a museum on its fringe, seems all the more haunting as Cape Town becomes a world city, internationalised by the end of apartheid. The creaking old Table Mountain cableway I remember has been replaced by swift Swiss cable cars, which revolve so that everyone gets a chance to photograph the view. The south-easter was blessedly absent as we roamed the top, but down the peninsula we could see the clouds gathering, and soon they were spilling over the lip of the mountain, forming the familiar "tablecloth".

Foreign money has poured into Cape Town, creating a new form of segregation based on wealth rather than race. Apartments in Clifton, on the precipitous slopes from Lion's Head down to the South Atlantic, and mansions in Constantia or Bishopscourt are well beyond the reach of most locals, whatever their colour. The city has become achingly fashionable, and spotting my childhood surroundings in television ads and shopping catalogues has become a regular pastime.

On our first afternoon we decided to move on from Camps Bay, which had been taken over by a crew filming a French mobile phone commercial, and head for the beach at Llandudno. But that was being used by a couple of David Bailey types to shoot an extremely mundane collection of T-shirts and shorts. It was December, after all, and next summer's campaign for Top Man or Next had to be wrapped up.

The international connection has its blessings, notably in the food - springbok steaks and rocket salad everywhere - and the wine, which has improved in quality as the industry competes with, and learns from, growers from New Zealand to California. At Fishhoek, an ice cream used to be the height of one's culinary expectations; now there is an expensive fish restaurant right on the beach. The run-down arcades of Simon's Town, once a slightly seamy naval harbour, have filled up with art galleries, café-bars and boutiques.

Many sell cuddly toys in the shape of African penguins, because a colony of these creatures, which used to stick to offshore islands, has become established in the coves nearby. Boulders beach, where I spent many long days courting skin cancer, is now a nature reserve for penguins, where you have to pay to get in. I was watched disdainfully by the new inhabitants as I sought to recapture the spirit of summers past by going for a swim, only to find the water full of their moulting feathers. They also smell, and bray just like donkeys - not for nothing are they known as jackass penguins.

The invaders of Boulders symbolise what is happening all over the Cape Peninsula. The small seaside suburbs of my youth are expanding to fill the limited space available; new roads have been thrown across the mountains, and if you want to have some peace at Cape Point, where a funicular has been built to spare you the climb, you have to get there early to beat the tour buses. There is a new environmental awareness - another thing we didn't know when I was young was that the peninsula's flora is unique - but it seems threatened by overcrowding and overbuilding.

Yet on our last afternoon we took the hydrofoil to Robben Island, where my father served in the navy during the Second World War, but which was forbidden territory for decades afterwards. Here the sad, scared old regime imprisoned Nelson Mandela and his comrades, the harshness of their conditions emphasised by the same stunning view of Cape Town that you would have from the deck of a cruise liner.

Whatever the city may face now, I thought as we roamed the soulless cell blocks, you wouldn't want to go back to this.

Give Me The Facts

How to get there

Virgin Holidays (0871 222 0307; www.virginholidays.com) offers a seven-night b&b break to Cape Town, staying at the Hotel Protea Seapoint, from £813 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights with Virgin Atlantic and transfers.

Where to get more information

South African Tourism (0870 155 0044; www.southafrica.net).

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