The True Bay - A Heritage Walking Tour through the V&A Waterfront

Name: The True Bay - A Heritage Walking Tour through the V&A Waterfront
Start: 2025-09-13T14:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-09-13T16:00:00+02:00
Location: Ferrymans

Schedule

Sat Sep 13 2025 at 02:00 pm to 04:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Ferrymans | Cape Town, WC

Our Spring season continues from the antique beach of yesteryear and ambles down to the docklands of the V&A to unpeel the last few decades of neoliberal greenwashing, revealing Cape Town's lush, sordid, anarchic, internecine and cornucopian history as the reviled & revered 'Tavern of the Seas'.
At one time the Cape Peninsula was possibly the second most important and frequently-docked harbour site in the world (can you believe London was the first?), and it still holds the mantle as the global capital for shipwrecks. As I usually end my Adderley wander by saying, this city was literally built (and continues to be built) on buried treasure.
And so much of it is still visible! From the aborted breakwaters that could have saved whole generations of sailors from storm-tossed nightmares, to the Portuguese watering-holes that capped centuries of Iberian curiosity with an innocuous empire of fish'n'chips, to the dozens of converted silos, batteries, warehouses, marinas and other slices of Victoriana that showcase - more clearly perhaps than anywhere else on the earth - how we changed from a species of merchants, wanderers and soldiers to a tidal wave of tourists, consumers and bemused spectators.
As ever, we'll start at 14h00, run in a just-under-two-hour circuit and then appeal for drinks and cussing banter at one or two or three of the nearest maritime inns. We'll start outside Ferryman's Tavern at the start of the V&A walk and then slice through four centuries to the heart of the first crossroads of all the world's hemispheres to end at the Table Bay Hotel.
RSVP just to make us happy and please share the good news with your local family/friends. Remember these tours are just as much for locals as for visitors (if not more!) and if you want to hear our lush range of kind reviews, read and relish the testimonies of my lovely attendees on my reviews section.
Bring your own anecdotes, hearsay, suncream, beer money, walking shoes, questions, curiosity, scepticism and indulgence.
See y'all there x
P.S. If you've read this far I'm guessing you'll want even more of the specs, so here goes:
- We'll be starting by Ferryman's Irish Tavern and finishing by the Table Bay Hotel just over two hours later, so happily park in one of the many mall garages or (lord forbid) take the MyCiTi bus the whole day to everywhere.
- We used to be donation-based but to secure our future we're now doing a pre-booking system whereby you can guarantee your tickets beforehand at R120pp, or you can join the tour on the day for R150pp in cash or EFT et al. Simply WhatsApp us on 076 033 8164 or Message us via the buttons on our home page to secure your place.
- This is a consistently well-reviewed heritage-focused walking tour; which is to say that all you'll need to enjoy yourself is curiosity about Cape Town's past (and History in general) and enough stamina to walk just less than 3km in one afternoon (with stops and snacks).
- If you're rejoining us, please please please please please please consider dropping us a short (or extensive) review on our Facebook Reviews or Google Reviews section as it will help spread our gospel of curiosity and playful appreciation across the internet and across the spectrum of all potential visitors to the Cape. It helps us more than you can believe!
- We've also introduced an optional R10 donation on your ticket which will go directly to the NGO Streetscapes as part of our mission to spread love, enthusiasm, mutual support and respect for all of Cape Town's people and histories. Just think how many people we could help and the difference we could make with a few hundred tours!
- Feel absolutely free to spread the word, invite friends who've been looking for this kind of experience and badger us with every imaginable heritage query. We live for it!
Can't wait to meet ya, really!