Our Spring season continues from the antique beach of yesteryear and ambles down to the docklands of the V&A to unpeel the last few decades of neoliberal greenwashing, revealing Cape Town's lush, sordid, anarchic, internecine and cornucopian history as the reviled & revered 'Tavern of the Seas'.
At one time the Cape Peninsula was possibly the second-most important and frequently-docked harbour site in the world (can you believe London was the first?), and it still holds the mantle as the global capital for shipwrecks. As I usually end my Adderley wander by saying, this city was literally built (and continues to be built) on buried treasure.
And so much of it is still visible! From the aborted breakwaters that could have saved whole generations of sailors from storm-tossed nightmares, to the Portuguese watering-holes that capped centuries of Iberian curiosity with an innocuous empire of fish'n'chips, to the dozens of converted silos, batteries, warehouses, marinas and other slices of Victoriana that showcase - more clearly perhaps than anywhere else on the earth - how we changed from a species of merchants, wanderers and soldiers to a tidal wave of tourists, consumers and bemused spectators.
As ever, we'll start at 14h00, run in a just-under-two-hour circuit and then appeal for drinks and cussing banter at one or two or three of the nearest maritime inns. We'll start outside Mitchell's Ale House at the start of the V&A walk and then slice through four centuries to the heart of the first crossroads of all the world's hemispheres to end at the Intercontinental Table Bay Hotel.
RSVP just to make us happy and please share the good news with your local family/friends. Remember these tours are just as much for locals as for visitors (if not more!) and if you want to hear our lush range of kind reviews, read and relish the testimonies of my lovely attendees on my reviews section.
Bring your own anecdotes, hearsay, suncream, beer money, walking shoes, questions, curiosity, scepticism and indulgence.
See y'all there x
“I attended Cameron’s V&A Waterfront tour yesterday, and it was excellent! His vast knowledge and colourful storytelling bring the past vividly to life, making the Waterfront feel completely new. I now see it with fresh and newly informed eyes. Highly recommended!”- Karien E.
P.S. If you've read this far I'm guessing you'll want even more of the specs, so here goes:- We'll be starting by the entrance to Mitchell's at 14h00 then finishing by the Intercontinental Table Bay Hotel two-and-a-bit hours later, so happily park in the the Ulundi Onsite Parking or (lord forbid) take the MyCiTi bus the whole day.- We've just put up our ticket prices for the first time in two-and-a-half years, from R120pp to R150pp. Obviously this is just to keep with inflation and to allow the tours to remain a sustainable enterprise for the foreseeable future, but this is still about R50 less per person than our nearest competition. In other words, we are deliberately undercharging the tours so as to keep them affordable for locals and visitors alike and to encourage guests to come back weekend after weekend.- Book via Quicket, WhatsApp us on 076 033 8164, E-mail us on cameronlukepeters812@gmail.com or Message us via the buttons on our home page to secure your place.- We have also just introduced a broad scheme of discounts you can apply for on each tour, so please do consult the list below before contacting us!- And we've decided to partner with a different local NGO or charity for each and every one of our tour routes so that R10 of every ticket purchased goes directly to a good, sustainable, local cause. For the Waterfront tour, we've chosen to fund-raise for SANCCOB, and you can inspect their brilliance here:https://sanccob.co.za- This is a consistently well-reviewed heritage-focused walking tour; which is to say that all you'll need to enjoy yourself is curiosity about Cape Town's past (and History in general) and enough stamina to walk just…
