Arusha or Cape Town?

Arusha has no beach at all. The nearest swim is the clear spring water at Chemka, an hour and a half's drive away, or else the lodge pool, and visitors who want sand fly on to Zanzibar after their safari.

Cape Town has real beaches, with a catch. The Atlantic coves at Clifton and Llandudno are beautiful but too cold for more than a quick dip, so for an actual swim you go to Muizenberg, St James or the tidal pools at Kalk Bay. All of this only works in summer.

Arusha's food is honest but limited: nyama choma with ugali, chipsi mayai from roadside stalls, mishkaki skewers in the evening, and the best food outing is a tour of a coffee farm on Meru's slopes. Most safari visitors end up eating buffet dinners at their lodge.

Cape Town is a dining destination in its own right. It has Cape Malay curries and bobotie from the Bo-Kaap, fish by the harbour at Kalk Bay, ambitious tasting menus around Bree Street and Woodstock, and wine estates less than an hour away. It doesn't have the street grills that Arusha has, but it beats Arusha on almost everything else.

Arusha's sights fit easily into half a day. There is the Natural History Museum inside the whitewashed German boma, the small museum on Nyerere's 1967 Arusha Declaration and the large craft galleries on the edge of town. The cultural encounters people remember happen outside town, on visits to Maasai and Meru villages.

Cape Town needs three or four days and has a much heavier story to tell. Robben Island, the District Six Museum and the Castle of Good Hope trace the long line from Dutch settlement to apartheid. The South African Museum and the National Gallery around the Company's Garden, the painted houses of the Bo-Kaap and Zeitz MOCAA's contemporary African art fill the rest of the itinerary.

Arusha has local bars pouring Kilimanjaro lager and a few clubs playing Bongo Flava at weekends, but the crowd is mostly residents and volunteers. Safari visitors usually go to bed early because the vehicles leave at dawn.

Cape Town has a proper night out, spread over several areas. There is the noisy backpacker strip on Long Street, the cocktail and wine bars of Bree and Kloof Streets, the gay quarter in De Waterkant, and summer sundowners at Camps Bay. In both cities you take a car between places after dark.

Both cities are superb for the outdoors, but Cape Town has more variety close at hand. Table Mountain rises right behind the centre, Lion's Head is a short sunrise climb, and the peninsula park runs down to Cape Point. On top of that come Kirstenbosch's fynbos, penguins at Boulders, whales in False Bay, surf at Muizenberg and the drive along Chapman's Peak, and you can do almost all of it on your own in a day.

Arusha's strength is narrower but grand: big game and big mountains. It has walking and canoe safaris in Arusha National Park, the crater rim of Meru, the Kilimanjaro gates two hours east, and elephants in Tarangire. Nearly all of it means a safari vehicle and long days, though, and the April and May rains make the tracks muddy.

If you leave the parks out, Arusha has few outings. There is Moshi's coffee co-operatives under Kilimanjaro, the market village of Mto wa Mbu, and community visits to Maasai bomas, and Olduvai Gorge is usually seen on the way to the Serengeti rather than as a trip of its own.

Cape Town has the Winelands under an hour away: the oak-lined streets of Stellenbosch, Franschhoek's valley restaurants, and hundreds of estates for tastings in Paarl and Constantia. You can add whale watching from the clifftops at Hermanus or Cape Dutch architecture in Tulbagh, though a car or a tour is needed for all of them.

In Arusha, the family experience is the safari itself. Seeing giraffes and elephants from the vehicle thrills children, but age limits on game drives, long bumpy days, malaria precautions and a town with little for children mean it works best with school-age children.

Cape Town is easier with younger children. There is the Two Oceans Aquarium, the penguins at Boulders, the cableway, Kirstenbosch's treetop walkway and calm tidal pools at St James. The main challenge is the distances, which almost always mean hiring a car.

Neither city is easy to explore on foot, but Cape Town gives you more freedom. Arusha's dala-dala minibuses and boda-boda motorbikes are hard for newcomers, and the pavements are broken, so in practice visitors use taxis and the vehicle that comes with their safari.

In Cape Town you can walk the City Bowl and the Waterfront by day, and MyCiTi buses run out to the Atlantic beaches and Hout Bay. Ride-hailing is cheap, and the good roads, driving on the left, make self-drive trips down the peninsula a pleasure.

Cape Town has the wider range of shops, while Arusha is the better place for East African crafts. Arusha's curio markets and galleries sell Maasai beadwork, red shuka blankets, Makonde carving and Tinga Tinga paintings, and tanzanite, mined only in the nearby hills, draws some visitors to its gem dealers.

Cape Town adds what Arusha lacks. The Waterfront mall has South African labels, Woodstock and Kloof Street sell local design and ceramics, and you can take home wine and rooibos, though its craft stalls on Greenmarket Square are less specialised.

Cape Town is the cheaper vacation overall, because there visitors spend their money on things that are cheap: restaurant meals, estate wine, car hire and ride-hailing. Accommodation by the beaches is the main expense, especially around Christmas and New Year.

Arusha's low local prices hardly help visitors. Street grills and guesthouses cost little, but park fees, driver-guides, lodges and mountain climbs are all charged at international rates, so a typical safari from here costs more in total.

Arusha has almost no stage to speak of. Most visitors see Maasai jumping dances at lodges and cultural villages, perhaps with a taarab or Bongo Flava band in a bar at the weekend.

Cape Town has its own musical tradition in Cape jazz, which you can hear in clubs, at a major annual jazz festival and at the summer sunset concerts on the lawns at Kirstenbosch. Artscape, the Baxter Theatre and the Cape Philharmonic add enough opera, drama and concerts for a couple of evenings.

Neither city has a bathing tradition, so both are better for slowing down than for treatments. In Arusha, rest means a day at a coffee-estate or garden lodge towards Usa River, with a massage and a view of Meru before or after the hard days on safari, away from the noisy town.

Cape Town offers more ways to unwind. You can spend long lunches on a wine estate, take early yoga in the Atlantic suburbs, join the morning swimmers in the False Bay tidal pools, or book a spa at one of the grander Winelands estates.