Here to see animals, it was the plants that blew my mind

Like many travellers to South Africa I’m here for the big things – the Big Five safari animals, sprawling wine estates, towering mountains – so when our guide Sompila explains that the Cape’s characteristic fynbos vegetation is part of the world’s smallest floral kingdom I barely raise an eyebrow. After all, I’ve joined the tour with the promise of adventure. Pocket-sized plant kingdoms, not so much.

But on our first day on Cape Town’s Table Mountain a new appreciation begins to bloom. Under Sompila’s guidance I learn that the UNESCO-listed Cape Floral Kingdom isn’t just the smallest, but also the richest of the world’s six floral kingdoms. Despite its size – a mere tuft on South Africa’s south-western tip – it has the greatest non-tropical concentration of higher plants than anywhere in the world. Now that is big news.

Before coming here I didn’t know my fynbos from my rooibos, but the minute Sompila gives us free time I leap onto one of the ranger-led nature walks, bouncing from proteas to mountain daisies like a rock hyrax. I’m tickled to discover that fynbos is an old Dutch word for “fine bush”, a perfect descriptor for these smallish plants that range from low-lying shrubs and delicate orchards, to succulents and sunbushes.

As a biology student at university, I studied zoology, drawn to animals “red in tooth and claw”. In comparison botany seemed too predictable, too constrained. A little nerdy even.

Until I stepped inside this floral kingdom. With the eagerness of an explorer I make notes about the fabulous fynbos five – Proteaceae, Ericaceae, Restionaceae, Asteraceae and Geophytes. Words that whisper of rogue plants evolving, adapting, thriving and surviving, all sketched in my notepad with a dedication that would make Charles Darwin proud.

It’s a budding shift, but my transition to the green side has begun.

A day tour to Cape Point Nature Reserve brings me nose to spike with a Protea lepidocarpodendron, one of the monarchs of the fynbos, while the Cape of Good Hope delivers a swathe of red Ericas, their petals bursting like fireworks. Forged by fire, fynbos is the Cape’s great illusionist; unremarkable from a distance, but up close it blazes like a thousand shooting stars.

The facts are mind-blowing – 9000 species in just 90,000 square-kilometres, making it even more rich and varied than the Amazon rainforest. And of these, almost 70 per cent are found nowhere else in the world. Forget the science, surely such a hot spot can only have come about by alchemy.

The magic continues during a coastal hike, when two baboons saunter across my path like lords surveying their kingdom. These natural-born foragers play an important role in the ecology of the fynbos, helping to spread seeds and regulate plant growth. In days to come, we’ll see monkeys and baboons in Kruger National Park, but the sight of this royal pair, their hooked tails waving like flags above the heath, is the story I’ll tell for years.

Our final stop at Boulders Beach on the way back to Cape Town brings animal antics of the African penguin kind. Critically endangered, this colony of 3000 birds relies on the dense fynbos for nesting and shelter.

It’s dusk as they come ashore, waddling through the undergrowth to feed their chicks beneath a low canopy of hardy leaves. With my new fynbos-tinted glasses firmly in place, I can better see that big things do come in small packages. If travel has one superpower, it’s the ability to transform us in the most surprising of ways.

The writer was a guest of Inspiring Vacations. See inspiringvacations.com