Where to purchase good map of Western Cape?
 

I did send for a map months ago, but it is not detailed enough for our stay in Capetown(a good street map) and our drive through the Winelands and Garden Route. Can you locals recommend a place to purchase a map either at the Joburg ariport or a shop in Capetown? I waited too long to purchase another one online before we leave.

Look for a CNA shop. They sell books and magazines, and have a large selection of maps. There's one in the Joburg airport and they're in the central business district of most towns.

hi, zin,

sorry you're having map problems -we had them too in SA when looking for a map of the eastern cape.

we got 2 really good maps from amazon - are you sure that you haven't got time for their fast delivery service to get to you? if you have, I strongly recommend the sunbird touring map of the western cape for the garden route, and the insight Fleximap for CPT itself.

sorry I can't help you with CPT book shops - we had our maps so didn't need one!

have a great trip,

regards, ann

Thanks for the CNA rec. Ann, I looked under every search heading on Amazon I could think of and could not come up with those two maps. Thanks anyway. Zin

hi, zin,

well ain't that odd. I've found before that amazon's search engine leaves something to be desired.

I goggled both of them; the insight fleximap does appear to be available on Amazon.com, you may have to get the sunbird map from the publisher. [also comes up on google].

For CPT, the insight map is better than the sunbird; but for the area around CPT, the winelands and the garden route, the sunbird map is best. If you were to have just one, the sunbird map covers all the area you want.

hope this helps,

regards, ann

Having spent several periods of time in the Cape Town/Winelands area in the past two years, I can tell you that we had real problems finding maps. We live in France and are used to Michelin maps, which are very detailed and very useful.

But in the Cape we kept getting lost - the maps we had were particularly bad for the outskirts of Cape Town - we found ourselves one day steaming up the N1, while we were trying to go east on on the N2, another day drove up from the coast into Cape Town, and back down again, trying to find our way out. I think the problem is that there are much greater distances between towns than there are in Europe, and so most maps just don't have the detail.

Finally we discovered that the Map Studio Street Guide - 'Cape Town and Peninsula - Includes towns of the western Cape' was just what we were looking for. I would never have looked at it, except that the owner of the rental apartment we stayed in had left one. Immediately went out and bought our own.

It covers all the roads in Cape Town Unicity Municipality, which is a much larger area than most visitors realise - it goes east to Somerset West and Gordon's Bay, (south of Stellenbosh ), and south to Cape Point. IN addition there are street maps for lots of other towns - Stellenbosch, Franschoek, Hermanus, Paarl, Tulbagh. North to Langebaan, east to Swellendam and Montagu.etc.

Nothing on the Garden Route, and you will need another map to get from one city to another, but as the navigator, I can't recommend it highly enough. Ours was R150 in January - it is available virtually everywhere