Get Your Heart Racing In Cape Town

If there was a competition for the best city for adrenaline junkies, Cape Town would be a clear contender. On the surface it’s a picture-perfect location with a verdant green mountainscape and sparkling seas. But scratch the surface and you will find a city waiting to give you goosebumps. Go diving with great whites, abseil down Table Mountain or take part in a tandem paraglide – Cape Town has it all.

Go Diving With Sharks

For the ultimate in hair-raising experiences, take a dive with a great white shark. These huge creatures (which can grow up to six metres in length) instil fear in the masses – a fear which was exponentially increased by Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic ‘Jaws’. The best place to face your fears head on is Gansbaii, a two-hour drive from Cape Town. This beach is home to thousands and thousands of seals which proves to be irresistable to the lurking sharks.

The White Shark Diving Company has accreditation from the GreenLine Responsible Tourism Rating Programme meaning that their business has been deemed to take in to account fully the environmental and social impacts of their dives. They offer a three-day tour from Cape Town to ensure that you get your fill of the great white shark.

Abseil Down Table Mountain

If you think the rotating floors of the cable car on the way up are scary, abseiling down Table Mountain is probably not for you. At 1,000 metres above sea level, the views from the top before you lower yourself down are pretty incredible. The descent down this famous Cape Town landmark will see you go hands free as you lean back off the edge of the rock. If this doesn’t get your heart racing, we don’t know what will.

Abseil Africa offer a package which costs just under £36 for a 45 minute abseil which is a lot of terror for your buck, if you ask us. Anyone over the age of 10 can take part which means that if you’re a family of Bear Grylls-esque characters you can all have a go.

Fly On A Tandem Paragliding Experience

If you like your ocean views, city vistas and mountain panoramas all with a dash of fear, paragliding in Cape Town could be just the thing for you! Running off a cliff with a stranger, with or without a fabric wing, is always going to rank highly in the most terrifying things you’ll ever do. There is however, bizarrely, a sense of calmness about paragliding. Once you’ve left your heart in your throat at take off, it all becomes very quiet above the hustle and bustle of the city.

Cape Town Tandem Paragliding offer ‘flights’ from Lion’s Head and Signal – both of which give you incredible views out over Table Mountain and the city below.

Do A Night Time Dive

Diving at night has a surreal quality to it – gliding through darkness with only a torch to guide you. Night dives give the diver the opportunity to get a whole new perspective on the fish that they love. Just as there are animals whose waking hours match with ours, and others who are entirely nocturnal – the same is true underneath the water. In Cape Town, when the sun goes down, under the waves you can see cuttle fish prowling the sands alongside a number of other night time lovers.

The Into The Blue Scuba Dive Centre in Cape Town offers a two-night three dives PADI Night Diver Scuba Diving Course for those who find the darkness too tempting to resist.

Go Ziplining

Ziplining is not for the faint hearted, that first step can be seriously daunting but after that it’s a different story. You slide off the mountain across trees and valleys so fast that you’ll forget all about your nerves.

SA Forest Adventures offer a tour which includes seven separate lines overlooking the Cape Peninsula from Silvermist Mountain. This highest of these lines is 155 metres above the ground, and the longest is around 500 metres in length, really allowing you to feel that wind in your hair.