Stony Point Penguins: The Quieter Colony on Clarence Drive

The Stony Point penguins live on a rocky headland in Betty's Bay, about 90 km from Cape Town, and on a weekday morning you can have the boardwalk more or less to yourself. It is the same species you queue for on the peninsula, nesting among the concrete footings of a whaling station that shut down last century. The road you take to get there, Clarence Drive, is the other half of the reason to go.

What is actually at Stony Point

The reserve is small and it does not try to be anything else. A raised boardwalk loops out over the low scrub and granite, the burrows sit directly under and beside it, and the whole circuit takes twenty minutes if you walk it briskly, an hour if you stop properly. There is a gate with a small entry fee and a modest visitor building. That is the entire infrastructure.

What makes it worth the drive is what shares the site. African penguins nest here alongside breeding cormorants, including some genuinely scarce ones, and the rocks are crawling with dassies, the stocky rodent-looking mammals that sunbathe in piles and are unbothered by people. Between the boardwalk and the sea you'll see the ruins of the whaling station: slipways, rusted iron, low concrete walls the birds now nest against. It is an odd piece of history to stand on while looking at a critically endangered seabird, and nobody at the site oversells it.

Bring a windbreaker. The headland is exposed, and the summer south-easter that Capetonians call the Cape Doctor arrives here with nothing in its way. Gate times follow daylight and shift with the season, so check them the day before rather than planning a sunset arrival.

Clarence Drive, the road that makes the trip

Most people drive to Betty's Bay on the inland route because a map app tells them to. Ignore it and take the R44 out of Gordon's Bay instead. Clarence Drive is a cliff road cut into the mountainside above False Bay, roughly a half hour of switchbacks, sea drops and stone parapets, with lay-bys where you can pull off properly rather than braking on a blind bend.

It is one of the best pieces of tarmac in the country and it is genuinely narrow in places. Baboon troops work the verges near the small coastal villages along the route, and they will open an unlocked car door and go through a picnic bag, so keep windows up where you see them. In whale season the lay-bys are real viewing points, not consolation prizes: southern right whales come well inshore along this stretch, and you are looking down at the water from height, which is the angle you never get from a beach.

The whole run from Cape Town to Betty's Bay takes around an hour and a half on this road, versus something close to that inland with nothing to look at. It is the rare scenic detour that costs you almost no time.

Stony Point or Boulders

They are different visits, not competing versions of the same one. Boulders Beach is bigger, better known, and the only place where you can swim in the same water as the birds, with a boardwalk built for real volume. It also absorbs every bus tour leaving the city between late morning and mid-afternoon. Our Boulders Beach guide covers which gate to use and how to time it around the coaches, and if the peninsula is your day, that is the one to read.

Stony Point gets a fraction of that traffic. There is no queue at the gate on most days, the boardwalk is quiet enough to hear the birds braying over the wind, and photographers get clean sightlines without a row of shoulders in the frame. The trade-off is that it is further from the city and there is no swimming, no cafe strip, no shops.

The practical answer for most travellers: if you are staying in Cape Town and want penguins in a half day, go to Boulders. If you are heading east anyway, towards Hermanus or the Garden Route, Stony Point is directly on your line and Boulders is a two-hour round trip in the wrong direction.

Pair it with Harold Porter

Betty's Bay has a second reason to stop, about five minutes from the penguins. Harold Porter National Botanical Garden sits where the mountains drop to the coast, and it is planted with the fynbos that actually grows on those slopes rather than an imported collection. Short paths cross streams and lawns near the entrance, and a steeper walk climbs into a kloof behind the garden to a waterfall.

The two sites work as a single morning. Penguins first, while the light is low and the boardwalk is empty, then the garden as the day warms up. Budget two to three hours for the pair with a coffee in between, and you are still on the road before lunch. In spring the fynbos is at its best, and it is the same season the whales are inshore, so a single trip covers both without doubling back.

Practical tips and what to book

Betty's Bay is the natural halfway stop on the run to Hermanus, which sits about another half hour up the coast, roughly 120 km and 100 minutes from Cape Town in total. Whale season there runs from about June to November, with the peak from September to mid-October, and our Hermanus whale season guide sets out the shore-based viewing in detail.

That combination is the strongest version of the day. If you're arriving and heading straight for the coast, an airport transfer through to Hermanus can take the Clarence Drive routing and stop at Stony Point on the way, which turns a transfer into most of a sightseeing day at no extra distance. Ask for it when you book, because the inland route is the default. Groups splitting the cost should look at the vehicle options before deciding.

Doing it yourself is fine if you're comfortable on a narrow cliff road on the left, in a right-hand-drive car, with baboons. A driver who runs this coast weekly is the easier version, and it's what we do across the Western Cape.

If you want the penguins, the pass and the whale coast in one run east, tell us your Hermanus date and we'll route you over Clarence Drive with a Stony Point stop built in.