The first sign is the sound. Somewhere after midnight in Simon's Town, a bray drifts up from the shoreline, half donkey, half foghorn, and you remember that your nearest neighbours are penguins. The Boulders colony began with a handful of breeding pairs in the early 1980s and grew into one of the only places on earth where you can swim in the same cove as a wild penguin.
It is also a front line. The African penguin is sliding towards extinction in the wild, and the people holding the line are largely one organisation: SANCCOB, the seabird hospital that rescues, rehabilitates and hand-rears the birds this coast is named for. Stay here, and your booking can back them.
