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STREETWISE Eating out: Cape Town is your oyster. Breakfast at the famous Kirstenbosch Gardens, lunch at Blues in Camps Bay, 438 2040. Eisbein and real ale at the Fireman's Arms, Mechau street, 419 1513. Dinner at the Hildebrand in the Waterfront, 425 3385. Sport: Walking or jogging on Table Mountain — one local guide lists a different trail for every day of the year. For the more adventurous, hire a bicycle for some sweaty mountainous pedaling. Shopping: Upper Long Street. Pavement cafes, Clarke's book shop (classic first editions), curios and curiosity shops. And don't miss the market in Greenmarket Square for everything from old brass to new African art. Coffee: Mugg and Bean at the Waterfront. And Seattle, in Cavendish Square, Claremont, where the bookworms from Exclusive Books next door mingle with the latte lovers. Internet Cafés: The Pinnacle, Burg Street. Serves full English breakfast, light lunches and pizzas. Open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday, 8.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. With coffee, $1.25 for first 15 minutes and 60¢ per 5 minutes thereafter.

It was no comfort to nelson mandela that for about 20 years in prison on Robben Island, off Cape Town, he could look out on one of the world's most dramatically beautiful coastlines.

The former prison island is just a 30-minute ferry ride from the Cape Town Waterfront, and visitors can take a two-and-a-half hour tour for $12.50. The Robben Island tour service runs from a jetty on the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, which rates as one of the world's best working harbor developments and is soon to have a "Little Venice" canal system that will link the lower city with the sea.

Once on Robben Island things turn a little more rugged: the buses that rattle around the 2-km by 3.5-km island take a battering from the weather and many of the guides are veterans of the African National Congress freedom struggle who are not professional communicators. You may struggle to find someone who can tell you just which was Mandela's cell. But Robben Island is a must, if only for the incredible view of the city and its trademark Table Mountain.

So too is a journey to the table-top of the mountain itself. The easy way is by modern revolving cable car. Alternatively, you can take a taxi to Constantia, a green and sheltered suburb at the back of the mountain and walk north to the top cable station to savor the view, lunch at the summit restaurant and take the cableway down. If the southeasterly wind isn't pumping — and it often is in summer — walking around the mountain and the lower gorges and appendages of Lion's Head and Signal Hill is a pleasure and a Cape Town must.

It's easy in Cape Town to forget you're in Africa. The freeway system is fast and efficient, although one doesn't ask about the unfinished elevated highway across the foreshore — an embarrassing monument to bad planning that Capetonians optimistically say might yet be completed. There are scores of hotels — new, refurbished and majestically old. A Cape Town tradition is tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Victorian-era Mount Nelson — known affectionately as the Nellie and as splendid as some of the English dowagers who stay there.

From the pillared gates of the Mount Nelson it is a straight downhill walk to the foreshore past the Gardens — originally planted by the Dutch East India Company settlers of 1652 to supply fresh vegetables — to the South African Museum, the National Art Gallery and the parliamentary complex, where a statue of an unsmiling Queen Victoria invites the attention of pigeons.

Downtown, off Adderley Street, modern office blocks, shopping malls and cosmopolitan restaurants stand next to buildings listed as national monuments, some dating back to the Dutch settler days. A recent addition to the archival circuit is the District Six museum that reminds visitors of the apartheid past when an entire colored (mixed-race) community was evicted from homes near the city center to make way for white development. Happily now, with the end of apartheid, the colored people are returning to District Six.

The scenery of the 50-km Cape peninsula is not to be missed. Although a portion of the route has been closed because of rock slides, a tour to Cape Point (not the southernmost point of Africa — that's Cape Agulhas, another 200 km to the south) is spectacular. If you're a wine lover, a quick taxi ride will take you to historic estates behind Table Mountain. You can do your tasting in the wineries' own first-class restaurants. We can all drink to that.

• PETER HAWTHORNE
• African city of history and beauty