In the Western Cape almost everything worth seeing happens in low season

Almost every trip to the Western Cape is booked for December or January, because that is summer there and winter at home. It is an understandable decision and almost always the wrong one. The three natural spectacles worth coming for — the whales, the flowers and the green landscape — all fall outside that window, and all three overlap in September.

The Western Cape is the only part of Africa with a genuine Mediterranean climate, and that means winter rain. Cape Town receives 492.8 millimetres a year: 92.3 fall in June, 84.8 in July and 72.4 in August, while January manages 9.4 and February 9.6.

The consequence is direct: the countryside is green and flowering when it rains — that is, in the southern winter — and brown and dusty in the southern summer. Anyone arriving in January finds a dry landscape; anyone arriving in September finds the same place unrecognisable.

Southern right whales come up from Antarctic waters to the Cape's south coast to mate and calve. The season runs from June to late November, peaking between August and October, when mothers with calves come very close inshore.

What sets this coast apart is that you do not need a boat. At Hermanus, on Walker Bay, the shore drops away very close in and the animals come into the bay, so they can be watched from the cliff and the promenade. It is one of the few places in the world where land-based watching works.

The best month for whales is the worst month for swimming. You have to choose, and almost nobody chooses well.

The second spectacle has calendar dates, not estimates. The Postberg section of West Coast National Park only opens to the public during flower season, from 1 August to 30 September. The rest of the year it is closed. The peak usually falls between mid-August and mid-September.

One detail ruins more visits than any other: these flowers close when there is no sun, and they turn to face it. Under overcast skies, the field you have seen in photographs simply is not there. The park's own advice is to go on a clear day, between mid-morning and mid-afternoon, when they are fully open.

Put another way: in August and September you need slack in the plan. If the day dawns grey, the flower outing moves to the next one and you do something else; forcing it achieves nothing.

The southern summer has its arguments, but it pays to know which. December and January give highs of 25.8 and 29.0 with almost no rain, very long days and the sea at its best, which on the Atlantic side is still cold: that coast averages 13 degrees a year.

The added drawback is the wind. In spring and summer the southeaster blows hard, known locally as the Cape Doctor because it carries the pollution away. It cleans the air and it also cancels boat trips, closes the mountain cableway and turns an afternoon on the beach into an endurance exercise.

And there is the price factor. December and January coincide with South African school holidays and the arrival of the northern hemisphere at once. It is the only time of year when the Western Cape is an expensive destination.

Here is the conflict that spoils many itineraries. The Western Cape rains in winter; the rest of South Africa rains in summer. And the wildlife parks of the northeast are best visited in the dry season, which there is precisely the southern winter: June, July, August and September, when animals concentrate at the few waterholes.

The good news is that in this particular case the two calendars do line up. August and September are simultaneously the best time for the northeastern wildlife and the best for the southwestern flowers and whales. The combination works; what does not work is doing it in January.

If you can only go once, go in September. It is the only month when peak flowers, whales with calves inshore and a still-green landscape coincide, with highs of 19.6 degrees and 44.3 millimetres of rain spread through it. No other window in the year brings all three together.

If you are going for the sea and the beaches, March is the sensible pick: 26.0 degrees, 12.5 millimetres, the water at its warmest and the high season already broken up. April is the second option, with the first rains and the countryside starting to turn.

And if December or January is your only possible date, book early and change the expectation: do not count on flowers, whales or green. Count on long days, cold sea, wind and the city at its most sociable. It is a different trip, not a worse version, as long as you know that before you leave.

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