Twelve Apostles helicopter flight: the buttresses along the Atlantic seaboard

The aircraft leaves the Waterfront, crosses Green Point and picks up the coast at Sea Point. From there the whole thing is a corridor: the Atlantic on the right, a wall of rock on the left, and a thin strip of extremely expensive real estate squeezed between them.

Clifton goes past first — four beaches separated by granite boulders, each one a different shape from the air. Then Camps Bay, which is the picture on the postcards: white sand, turquoise water, a line of restaurants and the buttresses standing directly behind the town like scenery flown in for the occasion. After Camps Bay the coast turns and the buttresses run in a continuous file, one after another, each with a scree slope beneath it and a gully between.

On an eighteen-minute flight this is where you are when the aircraft turns. On the twenty-seven-minute flight you carry on over Hout Bay — a working fishing harbour in a bowl of mountains — and cross the spine of the peninsula to come home along False Bay, which is warmer, wider and completely different in character.

The one thing photographs never convey is the scale relationship. From the road, the Apostles are big. From two thousand feet, with the whole line visible at once, they read as what they are: the last kilometres of a mountain range walking into the sea.

The buttresses get the name, but on the flight your eye spends most of its time on what lies at their feet.

Clifton comes first: four small beaches divided by granite outcrops, each one facing slightly differently, with a staircase of houses climbing the slope behind. From the air the division is obvious in a way it never is from the road, and the water between the boulders is the clearest turquoise on this coast.

Camps Bay follows — a single wide strand with a palm-lined road, a line of restaurants, and the Apostles standing directly behind it. This is the shot everybody takes and it is worth taking: from a helicopter the town reads as a narrow shelf between a wall of rock and an ocean, which is exactly what it is.

Then Llandudno, smaller and steeper, tucked into its own cove with no commercial strip at all, and beyond it the sandy sweep of Sandy Bay. After that the coast bends and Hout Bay opens up: a working fishing harbour in a bowl of mountains, with the Sentinel standing over the entrance and Chapman’s Peak Drive cut into the cliff on the far side. Most seaboard flights turn here.

The whole run is about fifteen kilometres of coast. On the ground, with traffic, it is a forty-minute drive. From the air it takes four minutes, and it is the four minutes people remember from the eighteen-minute flight.

The name is a colonial invention and a fairly late one. The Dutch called the ridge the Gable Mountains, after the shape of the buttresses seen from the sea, and the English name appears in the nineteenth century, applied by a governor with a taste for scripture.

Counting them is a fool’s errand, which is part of the charm. Depending on where you start and what you count as a separate buttress, the answer is somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. From a helicopter running the coast you can see why the count is ambiguous: the gullies between the faces are shallow at the top and deep at the bottom, so the ridge reads as continuous from above and as separate towers from below.

Each buttress has a local name — Kasteelspoort, Jubilee, Barrier, Valken and the rest — used by climbers and hikers on the paths that run up the gullies between them. None of that is in the flight commentary and none of it needs to be. What matters from the air is the rhythm: face, gully, face, gully, for six kilometres, with a scree apron at the bottom and a strip of houses squeezed onto it.