Table Mountain helicopter tour: what the flat top looks like from above

From the Foreshore, Table Mountain is a wall. From Blouberg across the bay it is a silhouette. From a helicopter it is what it actually is: a block of sandstone lying on a granite base, with a flat top about three kilometres long, a sheer front face above the city and a long back slope falling away towards Constantia and the southern suburbs.

The first thing people notice is how thin it is. The plateau that looks like a plain from below is a narrow shelf, and from a thousand feet above it you can see both edges at once — the front lip above the cable station and the back lip above the dams. The second thing they notice is the reservoirs: five small dams up there, invisible from the city, which is where the mountain stops being scenery and becomes a piece of geography with a job.

Then there is the cloth. When the south-easter blows, moist air is pushed up the back slope, condenses at the lip and pours over the front face like something spilled. From the ground it is a famous photograph. From a helicopter alongside it, it is a waterfall in slow motion, and it is the single most extraordinary thing you can see on any of these flights.

The circle. One flight on this page, twenty-four minutes at $352, goes all the way around the massif rather than along one side of it. That is the flight that shows you the back of the mountain, the dams, the Constantia valley and the return over the city, and it finishes with champagne on the pad. Rated 5.0 — from two reviews, so treat the score as thin evidence rather than proof.

The city loop. The twelve-minute flights — the Waterfront flight at $170 and the city-centre flight at $187 — keep the front face of the mountain in the windows for most of the flight while they cover the harbour, the stadium and Signal Hill. This is the cheapest way to photograph the front face with the city under it, and it is the flight most people should book.

The seaboard run. Eighteen minutes at $271 or twenty-seven at $352 spends less time on the mountain itself and more on what stands behind it: the Twelve Apostles, Camps Bay, Hout Bay and, on the longer flight, the crossing to False Bay. Book these when the coast is what you want and the mountain is the backdrop.

Table Mountain is a sandwich, and from the air you can see all three layers.

At the bottom sits granite, the oldest rock in the picture, visible around the base and in the boulders on the Clifton beaches. Above it lies a thin band of older shale, and on top of that a great thickness of hard, pale sandstone laid down in shallow water when this part of the world was somewhere else entirely. The sandstone is the flat part. It is tough, it lies in almost horizontal beds, and it has protected everything underneath it from weathering — which is precisely why the mountain has a table on top instead of a peak.

The same recipe explains the rest of the skyline. Lion’s Head has a sandstone cap on a granite cone, which is why it comes to a point. Devil’s Peak, on the other side of the front face, has lost most of its cap and is sliding towards being a normal mountain. The Twelve Apostles are the same sandstone bed, cut into buttresses by the gullies between them.

None of this is necessary to enjoy the flight, and all of it makes the twelve minutes land differently. You are not looking at a mountain with an unusual shape. You are looking at the edge of a plateau that used to cover far more of this coast, with the sea slowly taking it apart one buttress at a time.