Camps Bay and Hout Bay helicopter flight: the Atlantic seaboard in eighteen minutes

Minutes 0–2. Off the pad, over the harbour, past the stadium at Green Point and out along the seafront at Mouille Point with its red-and-white lighthouse. The mountain is behind your left shoulder and the whole city bowl is laid out under it.

Minutes 2–5. Sea Point’s promenade and apartment blocks give way to Bantry Bay and then Clifton: four beaches split by granite boulders, with the water turning from navy to turquoise as the sand shallows. This is where most people stop talking.

Minutes 5–8. Camps Bay. The wide strand, the palms along Victoria Road, the restaurants, and directly behind them the Twelve Apostles rising in a line. If you take one photograph on this flight, take it here.

Minutes 8–12. Llandudno in its own cove, Sandy Bay beyond it, and then the coast bends east into Hout Bay: a harbour full of working fishing boats, the Sentinel standing over the entrance, and Chapman’s Peak Drive cut into the cliff on the far side.

Minutes 12–18. The return, usually a little further out to sea or a little higher, which gives you the whole line of the Apostles at once rather than one buttress at a time — and then the city again, from the other side.

Camps Bay is a shelf. There is a wall of rock, a strip of houses and restaurants about three hundred metres wide, and then the Atlantic. From the ground it feels like a resort; from the air it is obviously a town that exists in a gap, and the gap is small. The water is a startling colour and almost nobody is in it, because the Atlantic on this side of the peninsula runs at around twelve to sixteen degrees all summer.

Hout Bay is the opposite: a proper bowl, wide and green, with a river, a valley behind it and a working harbour at one end. Fishing boats, a slipway, and often a seal colony visible off Duiker Island. The Sentinel — the blunt peak on the western side of the entrance — is the landmark you will recognise from the water later if you take a boat trip.

The road between them, Victoria Road, is one of the great coastal drives, and from a helicopter you get the whole of it at once: a thin line traced along the bottom of the buttresses with the sea directly below. If you are driving the peninsula later in the trip, this flight is an unusually good briefing for it.

A twelve-minute flight is one continuous impression. Eighteen minutes is long enough to settle, and people notice different things in the second half than in the first.

The first thing is the noise, or rather the lack of it. Headsets cut the rotor to a background thud and the pilot’s voice arrives clearly in the middle of your head. On a shared flight everybody can hear everybody, which sounds awkward and turns out to be sociable: somebody always asks the question you were going to ask.

The second is the banking. Pilots on this coast fly each landmark twice, turning so that first one side of the cabin looks down at it and then the other. If you are on the mountain side at Camps Bay, wait — you will get the beach on the way back. Knowing that in advance stops people spending the flight resenting their seat.

The third is how quickly the coast goes past. Fifteen kilometres of shoreline that takes forty minutes to drive in summer traffic passes in about four. Nobody is ever ready for Hout Bay to arrive, and the turn there is the moment most passengers realise they have been holding their breath.

The last is the light on the water. From the road the Atlantic here reads as dark blue. From two thousand feet in the morning it is banded — navy where it is deep, jade over the kelp, and a hard turquoise in the shallows off Clifton. That banding is the thing people try hardest to photograph and the thing they most often mention afterwards.

Past Hout Bay the coast road climbs into the cliff face and becomes Chapman’s Peak Drive: nine kilometres, a hundred and fourteen curves, cut into the boundary between two rock types about six hundred metres above the sea in places. It was built between 1915 and 1922 with convict labour, and it is one of the great coastal roads anywhere.

The eighteen-minute flight usually turns at or just past Hout Bay, so you get the start of it: the harbour, the Sentinel, and the road beginning its climb around the headland. The twenty-seven and forty-eight-minute flights run the whole thing.

From the air the engineering is obvious in a way it never is from the car. You see the half-tunnels cut into the rock, the rockfall netting, and the line the road takes along the contact between hard sandstone above and softer granite below — which is exactly why it is there and exactly why it closes after heavy rain.