The Harts Honeymoon in South Africa: Free Walking Tours Cape Town

When thinking about how we wanted to spend our time in Cape Town, of course budget was a concern. With big ticket items like a safari and some specific things we wanted to do like a peninsula tour (more on that to come), fitting in some less expensive activities was important. It was in my search for more affordable options that I ran across Free Walking Tours Cape Town. With tours covering everything from food to history to art, there was something for everyone. Most tours don’t require a reservation, so they are easy to fit around other activities or to decide on at the last minute. They operate on tips to the guides, so there is no upfront cost and you decide what the tour is worth.

We participated in two tours - Bo Kaap and Historic City Tour. Because of some protests in the evenings, we ended up doing the Bo Kaap tour on Sunday, rather than Saturday as originally planned. Although it was a good tour, Cape Town is really closed down on Sundays. If I had been aware of this, we would have planned things differently - heading out of the city on Sunday instead of Monday - and being able to get the full Bo Kaap experience on a day when everything was open. Even the trendy and usually busy Bree St was a ghost town on Sunday. Anyway, I digress.

All tours start at Motherland Coffee Company if you need a quick pick me up before you go. The green umbrellas are impossible to miss and both tours departed right on time.

If you didn’t know, Cape Town, and South Africa more generally, has a unique and complicated history. The Dutch initially established what was essentially a refueling port in Cape Town for the long journey to the West Indies. Sadly, this is also how slavery was initially introduced to the Cape. The import of slaves is one reason for the vast diversity in South Africa, including the Cape Malay who live in the Bo Kaap district. Later, what is now South Africa was more extensively colonized by the English, who outlawed slavery even as race relations became even more divisive. South Africa later became it’s own country. Modern Cape Town is an amalgam of all of this complexity, these various cultures and intersections.

This was reflected on our tour - one minute we were looking at a mural of Nelson Mandela, the next we were standing near the first enduring structure the Dutch built in Cape Town, and the next we were walking through an eastern food bazaar.

One of my favorite stops on the tour was the Company’s Garden. The garden began in 1650 to grow food to resupply ships midway through their long journey. Today, it is a lovely park with a restaurant that serves dishes made from the produce harvested daily from the gardens. Although our stop through the garden on the tour was relatively brief, we learned about the garden’s history and enjoyed it enough to return the next day to meander at our leisure.

The next day, we joined the Bo Kaap tour. Best known for it’s iconic colorful houses, Bo Kaap is so much more than that. A neighborhood where the Cape Malay lived (descendants of slaves from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia), it is place of delicious food and a lively Muslim community. In fact, the oldest mosque in South Africa is located here.

As I mentioned before, the tour would have been better on not a Sunday when all of the shops, like Atlas Spice, would have been open. Another spot we missed out on was Biesmiellah, perhaps the best known Cape Malay restaurant in Cape Town.

Despite our disappointment with the quietness of Cape Town (even the secret gin bar was closed), we found some comfort after the tour at a couple of Bree St. spots that were open. Cocktails at La Parada and cocktails and dessert (dessert so good we got some to-go later in the week) at Burger & Lobster helped ease the pain.

If you’re looking for something affordable and fun to do in Cape Town, definitely check out Free Walking Tours. The guides were informative and interesting, the history was fascinating, and walking tours are a great way to fit in some movement. I’m all about multitasking when I can. I know I’ve been writing about SA forever, but there is more to come! Peninsula tours, restaurants, one of the most amazing hikes I’ve ever done, wine country - Cape Town really had it all.