Day Eight

The day, hour by hour

• Morning

  Behind the scenes with the birds

  Feeding, weighing, and the pens graded by how long a bird can swim. Rescue stops being a word and becomes a place with people in it, one of whom will tell a nine-year-old that the African penguin is down to about one per cent of the population it had a century ago.

• Most weeks

  A release

  Penguins that meet the criteria are released every week, weather permitting, so this is likely rather than lucky. A crate carried down to the sand, a door opened, and a bird that walks, stops, looks back, and goes. Adults cry more than children do.

• Lunch

  Somewhere simple on the water

• Afternoon

  Up the cable car

  Straight to the front of the queue and up. The floor turns through a full circle as it climbs, so everybody gets the whole view without anybody having to be lifted up. Three thousand feet in five minutes, and the city goes from a place you are standing in to a map.

• On top

  The walk along the escarpment

  Almost every visitor takes a photograph at the top station and goes back down. We walk. Out along the edge of the escarpment with the whole of the Cape Peninsula falling away on one side and Devil’s Peak standing over the city on the other, and further out to the old stone reservoirs on the back table, built in the 1890s to supply a city that had run out of water and still sitting up there full.

  This is where I do most of my talking: why the mountain is flat, what the cloud is doing when it pours over the edge, who lived here before the Dutch arrived, where the water came from, and which of the plants under their feet grow nowhere else on earth. The children are climbing on rocks the whole time and take in more than anybody expects.

• For the ones who want it

  Or walk up, and ride down

  Families with older children sometimes want the mountain properly. Platteklip Gorge goes straight up the front — about two and a half hours of steep stone steps, with no shade and no easy way to stop halfway — and then the cable car down. It is a genuine climb rather than a stroll, and I will say honestly on the morning whether the party is up to it.

• Late afternoon

  Down, and into the city

  The cable car back down as the light goes long, and then the Waterfront on foot — which after a morning with the birds and an afternoon on a mountain is exactly the right amount of nothing.

• Evening

  A last dinner in the city

  Somewhere on the water, with the boats going past. Tomorrow is the sea again, and then home.

Who is where