Table Mountain stands 1,085 metres straight above the middle of Cape Town, and its top is flat for three kilometres. What you step out onto is not a summit but a plateau you can walk across, with the city, the bay and the Atlantic laid out beneath the edge. That flat top is also behind the mountain's best-known trick. When the south-easter pushes moist Atlantic air up the slopes it condenses at the rim and spills back over the level edge as a dense white sheet, the one Capetonians call the tablecloth. While it is out, there is no view from up there at all. The cable car climbs past the cliff faces in a few minutes, and its floor turns one slow circle on the way, so the whole ring of the view passes the window without anyone moving. The walking route is Platteklip Gorge, a cleft in the cliff taken as a relentless rock staircase, two to three hard hours with almost no shade and nowhere level to stop.
What grows on the plateau is the surprise. The scrub is fynbos, and this one mountain carries well over 1,400 plant species, more than the whole of Britain, many of them growing on this mountain and no other. In September and October most of it flowers at once, conebushes yellow, pincushions orange, sunbirds working the slopes. The plump dassies sunning themselves on the summit rocks look like oversized guinea pigs, and their closest living relatives are elephants. For the cliff itself there is a rope: 112 metres of abseil straight off the lip, with the whole city hanging under your boots. Tandem paragliders launch from Signal Hill, a shoulder of the same massif, and land on the seafront at Sea Point. From the old harbour basin at the V&A Waterfront the silhouette lines up, the level top filling the skyline behind the masts and cranes. On clear evenings the cableway keeps running after dark, and from the western edge you watch the bowl below you light up bulb by bulb.