Table Mountain is a flat-topped plateau of sandstone, about three kilometres from edge to edge, that stands 1,085 metres directly above the centre of Cape Town, South Africa, so that the city sits at its foot. The rock on top was laid down around half a billion years ago, which makes the mountain roughly six times older than the Himalayas, and its flat top is the reason for its most famous trick: when the south-easter blows moist Atlantic air up the slopes, cloud forms at the rim and spills over the level edge as a dense white sheet that Capetonians call the tablecloth, most often in the windy months of summer. The cable car climbs past sheer cliffs to the plateau in a few minutes, and its floor turns one slow full circle on the way so that every passenger sees the whole view without moving: the city, the two oceans meeting at the Cape, Robben Island out in the bay.
The other way up is Platteklip Gorge, a cleft in the cliff face that the trail climbs as a relentless staircase of rock, two to three hard hours from road to plateau. On top the surprise is what grows there. The scrub is fynbos, and it is absurdly rich: well over 1,400 plant species on this one mountain, more than in the whole of Britain, many of them found nowhere else on Earth, and in September and October most of it flowers at once, conebushes yellow and pincushions orange, with sunbirds working the slopes. The plump dassies sunning on the summit rocks look like oversized guinea pigs, but their closest living relatives are elephants. For those who want the cliff itself, a rope abseil drops 112 metres off the lip of the plateau down the sandstone face, one of the highest commercial abseils in the world, and tandem paragliders launch from Signal Hill, a shoulder of the same massif, to land on the seafront at Sea Point. From the old harbour at the V&A Waterfront the mountain rises straight behind the masts, its level top filling the skyline.