The Cape Peninsula

The Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula is cold — the Benguela upwelling puts the water in the low teens even in summer — and that cold is why it looks the way it does. Nutrient-rich upwelled water grows kelp forests of Ecklonia maxima, sea bamboo, which stands up from the rock on a gas-filled stipe and lies over on the surface, so a dive there is spent moving through a wood.

It is also a graveyard. The route round the Cape was the main sea road to India and Australia for three centuries, the approach is fog-bound in summer, and the coast north of Hout Bay is littered with iron steamers that got it wrong. The Maori of 1909 is the best known of them.