Adding Whales & Flowers to your Safari

Ask anyone in the business about the best time to go on safari in Southern Africa and the answer is always the same. Whether it’s the Kruger Park, Victoria Falls or Botswana, you’ll experience the driest weather, the lowest malaria risk and the easiest wildlife viewing during the long, dry winter season – from the start of June to the end of October.

But as the savannah landscapes dry up across Southern Africa, the opposite is happening in the Western Cape region of South Africa. Nourishing rains start falling in June, triggering masses of flowering plants to erupt out of the ground. Colourful sunbirds and sugarbirds take advantage of bright flowering winter-aloes and the clear coastal waters churn with the activity of southern right whales, migrating to the Cape from the deep Antarctic.

By the end of the rains in October, the Cape landscape has seen successive waves of flowers, carpeting some places in sheets of colour as well as providing winter food for the Cape’s unique wildlife characters – coastal-dwelling ostrich, rock pool-foraging baboons and herds of eland, Africa’s largest antelope. It’s a great time to go walking and hiking in the Western Cape – a region without malaria or large dangerous animals – and there are always local endemic birds to tick off.

Who could resist such a combination? And it’s easy to add whales, birds and flowers to your big game safari. There are flights from across Southern Africa to Cape Town, lying at the heart of the experience and providing the hub for you to branch out and explore further. You can quite literally watch elephants on the Zambezi River in the morning and raise a glass to Cape Town’s sunset that evening.

First, let’s get the timing right. The start of safari high season in June and July coincides with the wettest and coldest months in the Western Cape, and the whales are not there yet. It all changes in August when the whales begin to arrive and both Cape Town and the surrounding countryside explode into flower.

Now is the time to book a trip to Namaqualand in the Northern Cape to see the famous ‘desert flowers’ or perhaps the Cederberg Mountains, famous for their Khoisan rock paintings, but in truth there’s no need to go so far. The West Coast National Park lies no more than an hour and a half’s drive from Cape Town and is internationally renowned for its winter flowers – it’s ideal for a day trip.

There’s a subtle shift as August proceeds through September and October. The focus moves to the more mountainous areas where the Cape’s local vegetation – the fynbos – now enters its most colourful phase. Towering Table Mountain and rugged Cape Point are great flower-filled destinations in Cape Town while an hour’s drive takes you to the Whale Coast, centred round the town of Hermanus offering the easiest land-based whale watching in the world.

The spectacle of whales interacting with each other – fins flapping and tails waving – against a mountain backdrop is a magical one but if you want to place yourself at the absolute heart of both the flower and whale experience, then the De Hoop Nature Reserve on the southern Cape coast ticks all the boxes. A half-day drive from Cape Town and well worth a couple of nights’ stay, this hideaway fynbos sanctuary consistently records the greatest densities of migrating whales and offers visitors a wealth of guided activities to immerse themselves in the natural environment.

Then November. The summer rains start across Southern Africa’s safari destinations and animals begin to disperse from dry-season water, making wildlife watching more challenging. Conversely, the rains are ending across the Western Cape: flowers continue to bloom for a while longer, though more muted in scale, and the southern right whales slowly turn and begin their long trek south to polar waters.

But what a show they all left behind them.