At a typical beach, you might spend some time shooing seagulls away from your bag of potato chips.

But Boulder's beach near Cape Town, South Africa, is not a typical beach.

Because there, it is a different kind of bird that will pay your beach towel a visit.

Birds that can't fly, sound like donkeys, and look like they're wearing

teeny little tuxedos. These beach birds are penguins. You just have to sit somewhere quietly

and the birds will come. If you just sit quietly, they will literally come and start nibbling

on your towel.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. And today, we're taking you to Simons Town, South Africa,

where sunbaters and tourists mingle with penguins.

That's after this. If you find yourself driving around Simonsdown, South Africa, you want to keep an eye out for animals crossing the road.

Basically, you drive down towards the beach that you park, and probably by the time you've gotten out of your car, you've probably already seen a penguin kind of walk across the street.

This is Kada Ludina, and she works with a seabird rehabilitation center nearby that's called

San Cobb. And they have a team

of seabird rangers whose job is, among many other things, to rescue penguins from inconvenient

spots they find themselves in. They get called every five minutes by people saying, like,

sorry, there's a brood underneath my car. Can you please get it away?

Simonstown is on the western side of South Africa's Cape Peninsula.

Cape Town is about an hour away.

And this town, Simon's Town, it's a small beach community, home to just about 6,000 people

and a naval base.

But its most famous residents are for sure the penguins.

...