Chapman's Peak Drive - Dramatic Film Location in South Africa

Chapman's Peak Drive, a
stunning and scenic route
along the Cape Peninsula
outside Cape Town, is a road
that defies the odds. Carved
into almost sheer cliffs at several points, it is a tourist
attraction in itself, offering one
of the most dramatic ocean
drives in the world. It was
built to link the fishing village
of Hout Bay with Noordheok and complete the ambitious
dream of a road
circumnavigating the whole
peninsula, back in the early
days of the 20th century when
engineers attempted the impossible and won.

Chapman's Peak drive has been
used as a film location in so
many commercials and movies
that South African ex-pats on
the other side of the world are
no longer surprised to catch glimpses of their homeland in
the latest car advert. Scarcely a
month goes by when an
international film crew isn't
filming on location here,
perhaps with remote control helicopters to capture even
more dramatic shots of a car
chase around hair-raising hair-
pin bends with precipitous
drops to the ocean below.

It seems an unlikely place to
even think of building a road,
with at least a mile of
perpendicular cliffs descending
straight into rocky ocean floor
to deal with, but the newly appointed Administrator of the
Cape, Sir Frederick de Waal,
loved nothing more than a
road building challenge and
construction began in 1915.
Mining surveyor Charl Marais was engaged to determine a
possible solution and he
discovered that the
mountainside was composed
of a base of solid granite with
horizontal layers of softer sandstone and shale above.
This softer rock could be
excavated and the granite
would make a solid base for
the road to be constructed
upon. The work was dangerous, involving workers
being secured by ropes and
dangling over sheer drops as
they placed charges for
dynamiting the route. They
were in constant danger from rock falls and landslides, but in
the end they triumphed. The
new road was finally opened
in 1922 and remains to this day
a monument to man's tenacity
in overcoming obstacles.