Travel Guide:World Cup 2010

South Africa is a large, diverse and incredibly beautiful country. The size of France and Spain combined, and roughly twice the size of Texas, it varies from the picturesque Garden Route towns of the Western Cape to the raw subtropical coast of northern KwaZulu-Natal, with the vast Karoo semi-desert across its heart and one of Africa’s premier safari destinations, Kruger National Park, in the northeast. It’s also one of the great cultural meeting points of the African continent, a fact obscured by years of enforced racial segregation, but now manifest in the big cities.

Many visitors are pleasantly surprised by South Africa’s excellent infrastructure, which draws favourable comparison with countries such as Australia or the United States. Good air links and bus networks, excellent roads and a growing number of first-class B&Bs and guesthouses make South Africa a perfect touring country. For those on a budget, mushrooming backpacker hostels and backpacker buses provide cost-efficient means of exploring.

Yet despite all these facilities, South Africa is also something of an enigma; after so long as an international pariah, the “rainbow nation” is still struggling to find its identity. The country was organized for the benefit of whites, so it’s easy to get a very white-oriented experience of Africa. Most of the tourist industry remains white-run and, as a visitor, you’ll have to make an effort to meet members of the country’s African majority on equal terms. Apartheid may be dead, but its heritage still shapes South Africa in a very physical way. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the layout of towns and cities, the African areas – often desperately poor – are usually tucked out of sight.

South Africa’s population doesn’t reduce simply to black and white. The majority are Africans (79.5 percent of the population); whites make up 9 percent, followed by coloureds (just under 9 percent) – the descendants of white settlers, slaves and Africans, who speak English and Afrikaans and comprise the majority in the Western Cape. The remainder (2.5 percent) is comprised of Indians, who came to South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century as indentured labourers; most of the Indian community live in KwaZulu-Natal.

Even these statistics don’t tell the whole story. A better indication of South Africa’s diversity is the plethora of official languages, most of which represent a distinct culture with rural roots in different parts of the country. In each region you’ll see distinct styles of architecture, craftwork and sometimes dress. Perhaps more exciting still are the cities, where the whole country comes together in an alchemical blend of rural and urban, traditional and thoroughly modern.

Crime isn’t the indiscriminate phenomenon that press reports suggest, but it is an issue. Really, it’s a question of perspective – taking care but not becoming paranoid. Statistically, the odds of becoming a victim are highest in downtown Johannesburg, where violent crime is a daily reality.
Other cities present a reduced risk – similar to, say, some parts of the United States.

Fact file

• Covering 1,219,090 square kilometres, South Africa has a population of 48 million and eleven official languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Pedi, English, Ndebele, Sotho, Setswana, siSwati, Venda and Tsonga. The country’s religions comprise Christianity (68 percent), Islam (2 percent), Hinduism (1.5 percent) and indigenous beliefs (28.5 percent).

• South Africa is a multipartydemocracy, the head of state being President Thabo Mbeki. Parliament sits in Cape Town, the legislative capital, while Pretoria is the executive capital, from where the President and his cabinet run the country. The judicial capital is Bloemfontein, where the Supreme Court of Appeal sits, though the Constitutional Court is in Johannesburg. Each of the nine provinces has its own government.

• South Africa has the most advanced economy in Africa, with well-developed mining, manufacturing, agricultural and financial sectors. The country also has one of the greatest disparities of wealth in the world.

• Lesotho covers 30,355 square kilometres and has a population of 2 million. It is a constitutional monarchy, with King Letsie III as its head. The official languages are Sesotho and English.

• The Kingdom of Swaziland, ruled by King Mswati III, has an area of 17,363 square kilometres and a population of 1 million. The official languages are siSwati and English.

Jo’burg, or ‘Jozi’ as it’s more commonly known, is without a doubt the great big beating heart of South Africa, and has long played a Jekyll-and-Hyde role in the global consciousness. Often the stage on which the epic of this extraordinary nation has been played out, the colossus of Jo’burg – with all its thrills and foibles – is today a fascinating, multitudinous city, where all the ups and downs of 21st-century South Africa can be witnessed in three, multicolour dimensions.

In the past, the city’s darker personality proved the most enduring. The Jo’burg of the newsflash was a city where fear and loathing reigned supreme; a city where spiralling gun crime and poverty had manifested itself in a society where one half of the population stagnated, while the other looked on impassively through coils of razor wire.

As ever, there is an element of truth to the stereotypes. Jo’burg does bear scars of South Africa’s turbulent 20th century, and many will take time to heal. Stark inequalities persist, but armed with a new self-confidence – ironically most pronounced in the infamous township of Soweto – Africa’s giant hub is beginning to introduce itself to a healthier diet of urban renewal and social regeneration

The region surrounding Johannesburg was originally inhabited by San tribes. By the 1200s, groups of Bantu-speaking peoples started moving southwards from central Africa and encroached on the indigenous San population. By the mid 1700s, the broader region was densely settled by various Sotho-Tswana communities (one linguistic branch of Bantu-speakers), whose villages, towns, chiefdoms and kingdoms stretched from what is now Botswana in the west, to present day Lesotho in the south, to the present day Pedi areas of the northern Transvaal.

More specifically, the stone-walled ruins of Sotho-Tswana towns and villages are scattered around the parts of the former Transvaal in which Johannesburg is situated. The Sotho-Tswana practiced farming, raised cattle, sheep and goats, and extensively mined and smelted copper, iron and tin. Moreover, from the early 1960s until his retirement, Professor Revil Mason, of the University of the Witwatersrand, explored and documented many Late Iron Age archeological sites throughout the Johannesburg area, dating from between the 1100s and 1700s, and many of these sites contained the ruins of Sotho-Tswana mines and iron smelting furnaces, suggesting that the area was being exploited for its mineral wealth before the arrival of Europeans or the discovery of gold.[citation needed] The most prominent site within Johannesburg is Melville Koppies, which contains an iron smelting furnace. Many Sotho-Tswana towns and villages in the areas around Johannesburg were destroyed and their people driven away during the wars emanating from Zululand during the late 1700s and early 1800s (the mfecane or difaqane wars), and as a result, an offshoot of the Zulu kingdom, the Matabele, set up a kingdom to the northwest of Johannesburg around modern day Hartebeestpoort and Rustenburg, and historians believe that the Matebele kingdom dominated the Johannesburg area.[citation needed] The Dutch speaking Voortrekkers arrived in the early 1800s, driving away the Matebele with the help of Sotho-Tswana allies, establishing settlements around Rustenburg and Pretoria in the early 1830s, and claiming sovereignty over what would become Johannesburg as part of the South African Republic or Transvaal Republic. Gold was discovered in the 1880s and triggered the gold rush. Gold was initially discovered some 400 km to the east of present-day Johannesburg, in Barberton. Gold prospectors soon discovered that there were even richer gold reefs in the Witwatersrand. Gold was discovered at Langlaagte, Johannesburg in 1886.

Johannesburg was a dusty settlement some 55 km from the Transvaal Republic capital which was Pretoria. The town was much the same as any small prospecting settlement, but, as word spread, people flocked to the area from all other regions of the country, as well as from North America, the United Kingdom and Europe. As the value of control of the land increased, tensions developed between the Boer government in Pretoria and the British, culminating in the Jameson Raid that ended in fiasco at Doornkop in January 1896 and the Second Boer War (1899-1902) that saw British forces under Lord Roberts occupy the city on 30 May 1900 after a series of battles to the south of its then-limits.

Fighting took place at the Gatsrand Pass (near Zakariyya Park) on 27 May, north of Vanwyksrust -today’s Nancefield, Eldorado Park and Naturena – the next day, culminating in a mass infantry attack on what is now the waterworks ridge in Chiawelo and Senaoane on 29 May.

Controversy surrounds the origin of the name, as there were any number of people with the name “Johannes” who were involved in the early history of the city. The principal clerk attached to the office of the surveyor-general, Johannes Rissik, Christiaan Johannes Joubert, member of the Volksraad and the Republic’s chief of mining, Paul Kruger, President of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal). Rissik and Joubert were members of a delegation sent to England to attain mining rights for the area. Joubert had a park in the city named after him and Rissik street is today a main street where the (now dilapidated) Post Office and City Hall are located.

During the apartheid era, Johannesburg was divided into 11 local authorities, seven of which were white and four black or coloured. The white authorities were 90% self-sufficient from property tax and other local taxes, and spent ZAR 600 (USD 93) per person, while the black authorities were only 10% self-sufficient, spending R 100 (USD 15) per person.

The first post-apartheid City Council was created in 1995. The council adopted the slogan “One City, One Taxpayer” in order to highlight its primary goal of addressing unequal tax revenue distribution. To this end, revenue from wealthy, traditionally white areas would help pay for services needed in poorer, black areas. The City Council was divided into four regions, each with a substantially autonomous local regional authority that was to be overseen by a central metropolitan council. Furthermore, the municipal boundaries were expanded to include wealthy satellite towns like Sandton and Randburg, poorer neighbouring townships such as Soweto and Alexandra, and informal settlements like Orange Farm.

In 1999, Johannesburg appointed a city manager in order to reshape the city’s ailing financial situation.[citation needed] The manager, together with the Municipal Council, drew up a blueprint called “Igoli 2002″. This was a three-year plan that called upon the government to sell non-core assets, restructure certain utilities, and required that all others become self-sufficient. The plan took the city from near insolvency to an operating surplus of R 153 million (USD 23.6 million).

Following the creation of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Johannesburg was divided into eleven administrative regions (these regions did not correspond to the areas governed by the former local authorities). In 2006, the number of administrative regions was consolidated, from eleven to seven.

Johannesburg features a Subtropical highland climate. The city enjoys a dry, sunny climate, with the exception of occasional late afternoon downpours in the summer months of October to April.[citation needed] Temperatures in Johannesburg are usually fairly mild due to the city’s high altitude, with the average maximum daytime temperature in January of 26 °C (79 °F), dropping to an average maximum of around 16 °C (61 °F) in June. Summer is the sunniest time of the year, with cool days and cold nights. The temperature occasionally drops to below freezing at night, causing frost. Snow is a rare occurrence, with snowfall having been experienced in May 1956, August 1962, June 1964, September 1981 and August 2006 (light). Snow fell again on 27 June 2007, accumulating up to 10 centimetres (3.9 in) in the southern suburbs. Regular cold fronts pass over in winter bringing very cold southerly winds but usually clear skies. The annual average rainfall is 713 millimetres (28.1 in), which is mostly concentrated in the summer months. Infrequent showers occur through the course of the winter months.

Despite the relatively dry climate, Johannesburg has over ten million trees, and it is now the biggest man-made forest in the world, followed by Graskop in Mpumalanga that is the second biggest. Many trees were originally planted in the northern areas of the city at the end of the 19th century, to provide wood for the mining industry. The areas were developed by the Randlord, Hermann Eckstein, a German immigrant, who called the forest estates Sachsenwald. The name was changed to Saxonwold, now the name of a suburb, during World War I. Early (white) residents who moved into the areas (Parkhurst, Parktown, Parkview, Westcliff, Saxonwold, Houghton Estate, Illovo, Hyde Park, Dunkeld, Melrose, Inanda, Sandhurst) now collectively referred to as the Northern Suburbs retained many of the original trees and planted new ones, with the encouragement of successive city councils. In recent years, however, a considerable number of trees have been felled, to make way for the Northern Suburbs’ residential and commercial redevelopment.

Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula

CAPE TOWN is southern Africa’s most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Indeed, few urban centres anywhere can match its setting along the mountainous Cape Peninsula spine, which slides into the Atlantic Ocean. By far the most striking – and famous – of its sights is Table Mountain, frequently shrouded by clouds, and rearing up from the middle of the city.

More than a scenic backdrop, Table Mountain is the solid core of Cape Town, dividing the city into distinct zones with public gardens, wilderness, forests, hiking routes, vineyards and desirable residential areas trailing down its lower slopes. Standing on the tabletop, you can look north for a giddy view of the city centre, its docks lined with matchbox ships. To the west, beyond the mountainous Twelve Apostles, the drop is sheer and your eye sweeps across Africa’s priciest real estate, clinging to the slopes along the chilly but spectacularly beautiful Atlantic seaboard. To the south, the mountainsides are forested and several historic vineyards and the marvellous Botanical Gardens creep up the lower slopes. Beyond the oak-lined suburbs of Newlands and Constantia lies the warmer False Bay seaboard, which curves around towards Cape Point. Finally, relegated to the grim industrial east, are the coloured townships and black ghettos, spluttering in winter under the smoky pall of coal fires – your stark introduction to Cape Town when driving in.

To appreciate Cape Town you need to spend time outdoors, as Capetonians do: they hike, picnic or sunbathe, often choose mountain bikes in preference to cars, and turn adventure activities into an obsession. Sailboarders from around the world head for Table Bay for some of the world’s best windsurfing, and the brave (or unhinged) jump off Lion’s Head and paraglide down close to the Clifton beachfront. But the city offers sedate pleasures as well, along its hundreds of paths and 150km of beaches.

Cape Town’s rich urban texture is immediately apparent in its diverse architecture: an indigenous Cape Dutch style, rooted in the Netherlands, finds its apotheosis in the Constantia wine estates, which were themselves brought to new heights by French refugees in the seventeenth century; Muslim slaves, freed in the nineteenth century, added their minarets to the skyline; and the English, who invaded and freed these slaves, introduced Georgian and Victorian buildings. In the tightly packed terraces of twentieth-century Bo-Kaap and the tenements of District Six, coloured descendants of slaves evolved a unique, evocatively Capetonian brand of jazz, which is well worth catching live – it’s still played in the Cape Flats and some city-centre clubs.

Weather is an abiding obsession of Capetonians, and no climatic feature is more dominant in the mind of the city’s inhabitants than the southeaster, the cool summer wind that blows in across False Bay. It can singlehandedly determine what kind of day you’re going to have, and when it gusts at over 60kph you won’t want to be outdoors, let alone on the beach. Conversely, its gentler incarnation as the so-called Cape Doctor brings welcome relief on humid summer days, and lays the famous cloudy tablecloth on top of Table Mountain.

Highlights

The Bo-Kaap One of Cape Town’s oldest residential areas, its streets characterized by colourful nineteenth-century Cape Dutch and Georgian terraces.

Golden Lion Highlight of the Gold of Africa Museum, a major collection of historic African works of art.

Robben Island The infamous island prison that was Nelson Mandela’s home for nearly two decades.

Rotate up Table Mountain Take the revolving cable car to the tabletop.

Chapman’s Peak Drive Enjoy spectacular views as Cape Town’s most precipitous road winds along a cliffside above the pounding Atlantic.

The train to Simon’s Town Ride along the False Bay coast just metres from the crashing surf, with stunning views and the option of dining in the restaurant car.

Swim with penguins Boulders Beach offers wonderful bathing and is home to a colony of African penguins.

Cape Point The dramatically rocky southernmost section of the Cape Peninsula offers excellent hikes.

The Western Cape

The most mountainous and arguably the most beautiful of South Africa’s provinces, the Western Cape is also the most popular area of the country for foreign tourists. Curiously, it’s also the least African province. Visitors spend weeks here without exhausting its attractions, but frequently leave slightly disappointed, never having quite experienced an African beat. Of South Africa’s nine provinces, only the Western Cape and the Northern Cape don’t have an African majority; one person in five here is African, and the largest community, making up 55 percent of the population, are coloureds – people of mixed race descended from white settlers, indigenous Khoisan people and slaves from the East. Although the Western Cape appears to conform more closely to the First World than any other part of the country, the impression is strictly superficial. Beneath the prosperous feel of the Winelands and the Garden Route lies a reality of Third World poverty in squatter camps on the outskirts of well-to-do towns, and on some farms where nineteenth-century labour practices prevail, despite the end of apartheid.

Nevertheless, you can’t fail to be moved by the sensuous physical beauty of the province’s mountains, valleys and beaches. The Winelands, less than an hour from Cape Town, give full reign to the sybaritic pleasures of eating, drinking and visual feasting. Dutch colonial heritage reaches its peak in this region of gabled homesteads sitting among vineyards against a backdrop of slaty crags.

The best-known feature of the Western Cape is the Garden Route, a drive along the N2 that technically begins at Mossel Bay, where the freeway hits the coast, and continues east for 185km to Storms River. In reality it is taken as part of a journey between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, simply because these are the easiest places to catch flights and to pick up and drop off rental cars. The Garden Route proper can be driven in half a day, but to cover it so quickly would mean missing its essence, which can be found off the road in its coastal towns, lagoons, mountains and ancient forests, the highlight being the Tsitsikamma National Park, where the dark Storms River opens spectacularly into the Indian Ocean. Public transport along the Garden Route is better than anywhere in the country, partly because the route is a single stretch of freeway, and tour operators along the way have begun turning it into the country’s most concentrated strip for packaged adventure sports and outdoor activities.

To the east of the Winelands, the Breede River Valley is a region usually bypassed along the N1 en route to Johannesburg, but featuring among its faceless fruit-farming towns some hideaways, such as Greyton and McGregor, favoured by Capetonians as weekend retreats. Though the region has been almost totally neglected by visitors in the past, some creative marketing has now literally put it on the map as the Route 62, most of which consists of the intriguing R62 back road tracing its way through the interior, linking Little Karoo towns between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The timeless landscapes of the Little Karoo, the curtain-raiser to the semi-desert covering one-third of South Africa’s surface, is nowhere more rewarding nor more easily accessed than here. Less visited than it deserves, the Little Karoo is skirted by the N1 to the north and the N2 to the south, and offers a succession of dramatic – sometimes hair-raising – passes switch-backing across one mountain range after another.

The Overberg – roughly the area between Arniston and Mossel Bay along the coast, and as far inland as Swellendam – is another region that remains hidden behind the mountains during a hasty journey through. West of here, the Whale Coast, an angry stretch of Indian Ocean that has claimed hundreds of ships, is known for being the best area in the country for shore-based whale-watching, and there are a couple of pleasant coastal towns off the main routes along here. North of Cape Town, the less popular, remote and windswept West Coast is usually explored during the wild-flower months of August and September, when visitors converge on its centrepiece, the West Coast National Park. Its other major draw, 200km north of Cape Town on the N7, is the Cederberg mountain range, a rocky wilderness with hikes and hidden rock-art sites.

Apart from the annual explosion of wild flowers in the north, the Western Cape, as South Africa’s fynbos region, really scores on wilderness and flora. The plants you’ll glimpse from afar all along the coast and up every mountainside look like a nondescript grey-green blur of vegetation, but on closer examination reveal a rich kingdom of delicate flowering species rivalling the Amazon rainforest for biodiversity. Several national parks and nature reserves make excellent places to explore fynbos, as do all the hikes mentioned in this chapter, but you shouldn’t expect to see much African wildlife here, apart from a few game sanctuaries off the Garden Route. Though most reserves have a few zebra or antelope, the big game disappeared many years ago – reflecting the fact that South Africa’s longest-colonized province was also the first to taste the destructive power of firearms. By the same means, indigenous Khoikhoi and San people were virtually extinguished in the nineteenth century and Africans kept at a distance, some 1000km away on the “Eastern Frontier”, which accounts for their relatively small numbers in the Western Cape.

Highlights

The Winelands Quaff fine vintages on some of South Africa’s most beautiful wine estates.

Route 62 This mountainous inland route takes you through dozy villages, across spectacular passes and through semi-desert.

De Hoop Nature Reserve Massive dunes and edge-to-edge whales in season make this arguably the most exciting provincial nature reserve in the county.

Ocean safaris Learn about whales and dolphins on an excursion around Plettenberg Bay.

Canopy Tour Swing from tree to tree among the highest boughs of the Tsitsikamma Forest’s arboreal giants.

Storms River Mouth One of the most dramatic sections of coast, where hillside forests drop away to rocky coastline and the Storms River surges out of a gorge into the thundering ocean.

Seafood Feast on endless courses of fish, lobster and whatever else the ocean yields at one of the casual beachside eating places along the West Coast.

Oudrif An exceptional and remote retreat lodge on the edge of a gorge in the dry and dramatic redstone back country of the Cederberg.

The Northern Cape

The vast Northern Cape, the largest and most dispersed of South Africa’s provinces, is not an easy region to tackle as a visitor. From the lonely Atlantic coast to Kimberley, the provincial capital on its eastern border with the Free State, it covers over one-third of the nation’s landmass, an area dominated by heat, aridity, empty spaces and huge travelling distances. The miracles of the desert are the main attraction – improbable swaths of flowers, diamonds dug from the dirt and wild animals roaming the dunes.

The most significant of these surprises is the Orange (or Oranje) River, flowing from the Lesotho Highlands to the Atlantic, where it marks South Africa’s border with Namibia. The river, often with parched land stretching for hundreds of kilometres on either side, separates the Kalahari and Great Karoo – the two sparsely populated semi-desert ecosystems that fill the interior of the Northern Cape. It was by the Orange that diamonds were first discovered in the 1860s, although it was in the Vaal River’s alluvial deposits and the nearby dry diggings around Kimberley that the story of diamonds would unfold in its most compelling detail.

Large irrigation schemes have created a stretch of incongruous green along the course of the Orange, principally around the isolated northern centre of Upington, the main town in the Kalahari region. A small but important town, Upington acts as a major gateway to the magnificent Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, one of the finest game-viewing parks in South Africa, and the smaller Augrabies Falls National Park, where the Orange plunges dramatically into a large granite gorge.

In Namaqualand, on the western side of the province, the brief winter rains produce one of nature’s truly glorious transformations, when in August and September the land is carpeted by a magnificent display of wild flowers. A similar display of blossoming succulents can be seen at the little-visited Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, a mountain desert tucked around a loop in the Orange River, either side of the Namibian border.

Despite these impressive natural attractions, the most commonly visited part of the Northern Cape is its southeastern corner, through which the two main routes between Johannesburg and Cape Town, the N1 and the N12, pass. While the N12 provides a good opportunity to spend a day or so in Kimberley, neither route offers particularly inspiring scenery or sights, and so the southeast of the province isn’t covered in this book. A less obvious option is to take the N14 from Johannesburg through Upington, passing the atmospheric old mission station at Kuruman, and on to Springbok and the N7 to Cape Town. This route is around 400km longer than the N1 or N12 and, while it doesn’t offer respite from long, empty landscapes, the sights on the way are more interesting; it also puts the Augrabies, Kgalagadi and Richtersveld national parks within striking distance.

Getting around by public transport can be a pain. While the main towns of Kimberley, Springbok and Upington lie on Intercape’s bus routes (with connections to Windhoek in Namibia), many services arrive and depart at night and thus miss the scenery. Minibus taxis cover most destinations several times a day during the week, but are much reduced or nonexistent at weekends. Taxis don’t serve the national parks (take an organized tour instead). As ever, early starts (6–7am) are best. Details of the most useful routes are given in the text.

Highlights

Kimberley Diamond Tour Head 1km underground into a working mine, then visit the hand-diggings on the Vaal River, in the steps of Cecil Rhodes and the pioneer diamond hunters.

Augrabies Falls Africa’s second-biggest waterfall, where the Orange River thunders into an echoing gorge.

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park Discover lion, gemsbok and suricate among the parched red sand dunes of the Kalahari.

Pella Mission One of the country’s most improbable sights, a towering yellow cathedral in the middle of a tiny, dusty mission village.

Kuruman Mission Built by pioneering missionaries Robert and Mary Moffat, the starting point for David Livingstone’s exploration into the interior, and still a venerable and tranquil spot.

Namaqualand flowers In August and September the veld puts on a superb natural floral display.

Richtersveld Transfrontier Park South Africa’s only mountain desert, a hot, dry and forbidding place which can only be explored by 4WD or by drifting down the Orange River in an inflatable canoe.

The Eastern Cape

Sandwiched between the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’s two most popular coastal provinces, the Eastern Cape tends to be bypassed by visitors – and for all the wrong reasons. The relative neglect it has suffered as a tourist destination and at the hands of the government is precisely where its charm lies. You can still find traditional African villages here, and the region’s 1000km of undeveloped coastline alone justifies a visit, sweeping back inland in immense undulations of vegetated dunefields. For anyone wanting to get off the beaten track, the province is, in fact, one of the most rewarding regions in South Africa.

Port Elizabeth is the province’s commercial centre, principally used to start or end a trip along the Garden Route, though it’s a useful springboard for launching out into the rest of South Africa – the city is the transport hub of the Eastern Cape, well served by flights, trains, buses and car rental companies. Jeffrey’s Bay, 75km to the west, has a fabled reputation among surfers for its perfect waves. East of Port Elizabeth the R72 coastal road, a great rolling journey, provides easy access to a series of unassuming resorts, all gloriously sited on euphorbia-clad hillsides at the mouths of lazy rivers. Around an hour’s drive inland are some of the province’s most significant game reserves, the only places in the southern half of the country providing serious game viewing, among them Addo Elephant Park, a Big Five reserve where sightings of elephants are virtually guaranteed. Addo and the private reserves nearby are among the few game reserves in South Africa that are malaria-free throughout the year. The hinterland to the north takes in areas appropriated by English immigrants shipped out in the 1820s as ballast for a new British colony. Here, Grahamstown glories in its twin roles as the spiritual home of English-speaking South Africa and host to Africa’s biggest arts festival. Close by, the giraffe, antelope and hippo country of the Great Fish River Reserve Complex comprises stony hills vegetated by monumental candelabra-like succulents and river courses lined with thorn trees.

The northwest is dominated by the sparse beauty of the Karoo, the thorny semi-desert stretching across much of central South Africa. The rugged Mountain Zebra National Park, 200km north of Port Elizabeth, is a terrific place to watch herbivorous game in a stirring landscape of flat-topped mountains and arid plains stretching for hundreds of kilometres. A short step to the west, Graaff-Reinet is the quintessential eighteenth-century Cape Dutch Karoo town, with its serene whitewashed streetscape.

The eastern part of the province, largely the former Transkei, is by far the least developed, with rural Xhosa villages predominating. East London, the province’s only other centre of any size, sits on the cusp of the former “white” South Africa and the African “homelands”, and also serves well as a springboard for heading north into the central region, where the principal interest derives from political and cultural connections. Steve Biko was born here, and you can visit his grave in King William’s Town to the west. Further west is Alice, less well known than its university, Fort Hare, which educated many contemporary African leaders, including Nelson Mandela. The only established resorts in this section are in the Amatola Mountains, where indigenous forests and mossy coolness provide relief from the dry scrublands below. Tucked into the northeastern corner of the province, the Drakensberg range, more commonly associated with KwaZulu-Natal, makes a steep ascent out of the Karoo and offers trout-fishing, skiing in winter and ancient San rock art. The focus of the area is the remote, lovely village of Rhodes, a long journey down a rough road, which rewards you with absolute tranquillity and exceptional views.

Further east, the Wild Coast region remains one of the least developed and most exciting regions in the country. It’s also the poorest part of the poorest province, a fact reflecting its historic role as a dumping ground for black South Africans. Despite this, the region is blessed with fabulously beautiful subtropical coast. From here, all the way to the KwaZulu-Natal border, dirt roads trundle down to the coast from the N2 to dozens of remote and indolent hillside resorts, of which Port St Johns is the biggest and best known. West of Port St Johns, the Wild Coast Hotel Meander, an organized walking trail, takes in a deserted stretch of cliffs and sands with convenient stops at small family resort hotels. Along the coast to the east of town you can explore beaches and rural villages on horseback as part of the community-run Amadiba Trail, which starts near the KwaZulu-Natal border. In the rugged goat-chewed landscape inland, Xhosa-speakers live in mud-and-tin homesteads, scraping a living herding stock and growing crops. Most visitors pass as quickly as possible through Umtata, the ugly former capital of the Transkei – but if you’re following in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela, the Nelson Mandela Museum in the centre of Umtata and Qunu, his birthplace southwest of the town, are obvious ports of call.
Highlights

Port Elizabeth township tour Several guides run very accessible tours into the African areas of the province’s largest city.

Addo Elephant National Park See pachyderms and the rest of the Big Five in the best game reserve in the malaria-free southern half of the country.

Grahamstown Festival Africa’s largest arts festival wakes up this pretty colonial university town.

The Tuishuise Accommodation in a street of beautifully restored and furnished Victorian houses in the historic frontier town of Cradock.

Karoo farmstays Experience the sharp light and panoramic landscape of the Karoo semi-desert that sweeps across South Africa’s interior.

Fort Hare art gallery A superb collection of black South African art buried in the remote university that educated many of the country’s leaders, including Nelson Mandela.

Wild Coast family hotels Terrific hotels occupying isolated spots along ravishing subtropical coastline.

Amadiba Horse Trail Explore unspoilt areas inaccessible by car on this riding excursion, led by members of the local Pondo community.

Bulungula Backpacker Lodge In a remote Wild Coast village, this brilliant base offers a vivid experience of Xhosa life and culture.

Limpopo (Northern Province)

Limpopo province is South Africa’s no-man’s-land: a hot, thornbush-covered area caught between the dynamic heartland of Gauteng and, to the north, the Limpopo River, which acts as South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe and, further west, Botswana. Running through the centre of this no-man’s-land is the busy N1 highway, here often called the Great North Road. The N1 links a series of towns established by the Voortrekker settlers; most of these are little more than service centres for the surrounding farmland, and few have any real attraction beyond what they offer on a practical level – somewhere to sleep or eat while en route to somewhere else. All have significant black populations, though the prevailing flavour of the towns is strongly Afrikaner, with little in the landscape to lighten the sometimes uncomfortable tone this sets. The N1 is also South Africa’s umbilical cord to the rest of Africa, and the importance of the N1 overshadows the rest of the province.

The eastern side of the province is game-rich lowveld, dominated by the seventy-kilometre-wide strip of Kruger National Park abutting the Mozambique border. This part of Limpopo is covered along with Kruger itself in the preceding chapter. The principal attractions of the rest of the province lie in its three wild and distinctive mountain escarpments. The most significant of these is the first rise of the Drakensberg Escarpment, on its long and often spectacular sweep through South Africa from north to south, marking the descent from highveld to lowveld. There’s a lot to see in the mountains themselves, especially in the haunting, forested slopes of the Letaba area immediately to the east of Polokwane, the provincial capital. This region of lakes and waterfalls also provides some excellent walking and comfortable country guesthouses.

Name changes in Limpopo

The Northern Province was renamed Limpopo in 2002 and the capital, Pietersburg, was subsequently renamed Polokwane. A number of other towns with “colonial” names have also undergone official name changes, with more likely to follow suit in the future, though the old names won’t fall out of use all that quickly, especially as the amending of signage is proving a slow process.

On the tranquil and remote western side of the N1 lies the sedate Waterberg massif. Once a domain of cattle farming and hunting, in the last two decades the area has transformed into a region dedicated to wildlife conservation, becoming a UNESCO Biosphere and offering malaria-free Big Five game viewing. In the north, lying parallel to the Limpopo River and bisected by the N1, are the subtropical Soutpansberg Mountains, and the intriguing and still very independently minded Venda region, a homeland during the apartheid era, to the east. North of the Soutpansberg are wide plains dominated by surreal baobab trees, much in evidence along the N1 as it leads to the only (very busy) border post between South Africa and Zimbabwe, at Beitbridge. The only viable alternative if you want to get to Zimbabwe from South Africa is the Groblersbrug/Martin’s Drift border crossing (daily 8am–4pm) on the N11, although this means detouring through Botswana.

For all its grand title, the N1 has only recently seen a major upgrading, but by South African standards it is now fast and easy, if often busy. It becomes a toll road from just before Modimolle to Polokwane, and then again from Polokwane to Makhado south of the Soutpansberg Mountains. Though it’s possible to use alternative roads, the charges aren’t crippling for a one-off journey, and don’t merit skimping on. As regards public transport, Greyhound, Intercape and Translux buses ply the N1 between Johannesburg and Beitbridge, stopping at Bela-Bela, Polokwane, Makhado and Musina; most services carry on to either Bulawayo and Victoria Falls or Harare in Zimbabwe. Northlink Tours runs buses between Tzaneen and Johannesburg via Polokwane. These and other routes are also covered by minibus taxis from any moderately sized town; the best way to find out where they’re going and when they depart is to enquire at the taxi rank.
Parts of Limpopo are malarial; you will need to take prophylactics, and exercise caution against mosquitoes if you are travelling in the lowveld, including Kruger National Park, or north of the Soutpansberg Mountains. The Waterberg and Letaba areas were not affected at the time of writing, though it’s worth double-checking the current situation before you go.

Highlights

Exploring the Letaba Experience this other-worldly area of forests, subtropical tea plantations, misty lakes and upmarket country-house guesthouses.

Lapalala Wilderness A wildlife conservation area at the heart of the Waterberg Biosphere, containing the world’s only rhino museum.

Horse-riding in the Waterberg This mountain range offers some of South Africa’s finest wilderness riding and horseback safaris.

Venda crafts Explore the remote, simple villages of the mystical Venda region and discover its skilful and distinctive art, pottery and wood carvings.

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