Donovan is far from your average gardener. A dreadlocked Rastafarian, the 36-year-old lives in one of the 300 or so ‘informal houses’ (ie shacks) that fringe the Hangberg district of Hout Bay, a fishing village hugging the Cape Peninsula, 20km south from Cape Town’s central business district. Using his carpentry skills learned earlier in his life while a boat builder, as well as some rocks and old tyres to stabilise the sandy ground, Donovan has created a garden – planted with indigenous fynbos – that unfolds in a series of terraces, each providing spectacular views across Hout Bay’s picturesque harbour towards Chapman’s Peak. In 2006 it won top prize in the national Gardens of Pride contest.

From his front porch, Donovan can see the public housing block in which he was born, as well as the school where he’s working with the students on an environmental greening project that aims to rid the area of alien vegetation. Between the plants pad several stray cats that Donovan and his family care for. “I like visitors to bring some food for them,” he tells a small group of tourists who are surprised and delighted to find such a beautiful garden in the most unlikely of places.

Donovan explains how Hangberg was reserved for Hout Bay’s ‘coloured’ residents during apartheid. Fifteen years on from South Africa’s first fully democratic elections it pretty much remains a coloured-only community, just as inland from the harbour, Hout Bay’s poor shack township of Imizamo Yethu is still an enclave for the local black population.

As Donovan points out: “Hout Bay is a microcosm of South Africa.” Listening to him discuss everything from the challenges involved in creating and maintaining his garden to the country’s turbulent history, both the contemporary complexity of life here and the bright possibilities for the future come sharply into focus.

We all know about Cape Town’s superb natural attributes, the most famous of which is iconic Table Mountain. Factor in soft sand beaches, centuries-old vineyards, adrenaline-pumped activities ranging from abseiling to shark-cage diving, and a plethora of restaurants serving delicious cuisine, and it’s understandable why many visitors only faintly register, if at all, the Mother City’s greatest asset: its people.

Since 2004 the Cape Town-based tour company Coffeebeans Routes has been assisting those who wish to connect with the diverse constituents of a port city that has been absorbing cultures and people for over 500 years. Donovan is one of a couple of fascinating characters who share their stories on their Private Gardens Route tour. Among the company’s other 12 routes that take participants beyond Cape Town’s superficial delights are itineraries based on art, food, spirituality and music, including the tour that was Coffeebeans Route’s first innovate product, the Cape Town Jazz Safari.

“I got the idea for this when I was teaching at an English-as-a-foreign-language school,” explains Coffeebeans Routes founder Iain Harris. The clued-up 33-year-old had previously promoted musicians from across the continent via an online site (www.afribeat.com) and a series of critically acclaimed, but unprofitable, CDs. In the process he had made friends and contacts across Cape Town’s racial boundaries, in communities as diverse as Higgovale, a ritzy suburb in a sheltered cleft on Table Mountain, and Gugulethu, one of the apartheid-created townships of the Cape Flats. When his students asked him about opportunities to meet with interesting Capetonians, Harris knew exactly where to take them.

“We got into my little Volkswagen and drove out to Kalkfontein where I introduced them to Jethro Louw, a poet,” he says. The students’ eyes were opened not only to how people lived outside the white Eurocentric heart of Cape Town, but also to aspects of KhioKhoi culture, celebrated in Jethro’s poems and songs. “I began to see how I could create a business from connecting visitors to Cape Town with aspects of the city that they might encounter on regular townships tours or strolling around the Waterfront,” Harris continues.

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The concept really took off, though, when Harris teamed up with Michael Wolf from Andulela, another Cape Town-based tour company, to work on a music-based itinerary. “We wanted to offer intimate evenings in the homes of a variety of Cape Town musicians: high tea with a musical storyteller, if you like,” says Harris. “The participants would listen to their music, hear their stories. The evening would then be rounded off at a local jazz venue for another performance and a light meal.” Thus the Cape Town Jazz Safari was born and Harris had a blueprint for what would become Coffeebeans Routes.

Harris explains how he came up with this name: “Everywhere in the world, across all languages, creeds and borders, everybody understands coffee. It is the universal communion. Our aim is to facilitate communion across borders that are both real and imagined – to create the platforms that bring people together across boundaries, and in doing so, help them discover shared resources and opportunities.” A nice touch is that tour participants all receive a bag of freshly roasted coffee beans as a souvenir of their experience.

Coffeebeans Routes and Andelula continue to cooperate on several tours, including a football-focused itinerary that could hardly be timelier with the World Cup headed to South Africa in 2010. The tour provides a marvellous insight into how football is organised and practiced at both professional and amateur levels in Cape Town. It’s led by Gugulethu-born Sizwe Mbebe, an enthusiastic 26-year-old journalist and former teenage football talent who has started a website devoted to the game (www.thesoccerpages.com), and includes the chance to kick around a ball with local amateur teams.

On the Art Route, participants not only visit traditional galleries, but also get to meet local artists in their studios, including a bohemian potter who incorporates doilies and dolls into his creations, and a Mozambican woman who works with hessian and also cooks a mean dhal and rice. Delicious food served in homely settings is another hallmark of the Coffeebeans Routes experience.

Harris’ love of music continues to underlie much of what he does. Apart from the jazz safari, there’s a hip hop tour and a rootz reggae trip to Marcus Garvey, a Rastafarian settlement in the township of Philippi, for a night of Jamaican food and, after midnight, live reggae at a dance hall. In 2007, sponsorship from both local and central government helped Harris organised Goemarati, a series of 13 shows across the city involving over 250 different performers. That has now resulted in a CD which can be bought via the company’s website.

Back on the Private Gardens Route, Harris has escorted the group to the final stop, the exquisite six-level garden of Alan Grant, an American expat who has made Cape Town home for the past decade. “It’s a multicultural garden,” says Grant, noting the hibiscus thriving beside his oak trees and the ericas beside the purple and white yesterday-today-and-tomorrows, “and yet it’s full of harmony.” Get acquainted with the city the Coffeebeans Routes way and you’re likely to come away feeling the same about Cape Town.