Murky Depths
Shark Diving in South Africa
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Celebrities
An Eddie Global dispatch from South Africa.
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Kruger National Park Safari
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in South Africa.
Read MoreSouth Africa contains more contrast than a single trip can absorb. Cape Town alone offers Table Mountain, penguin colonies at Boulders Beach, and vineyards in Stellenbosch within an hour's drive of townships still working through the long aftermath of apartheid. I have gone on safari in Kruger at dawn and eaten a tasting menu in Franschhoek by evening, a whiplash the country seems used to producing. What stays with me most is the directness of its history: Robben Island, where Mandela spent eighteen years, is a short ferry ride from the V&A Waterfront's shopping crowds, and no one pretends these two facts are unrelated. South Africa does not offer easy narratives. It offers instead an unusually wide range of terrain, wildlife, wine, and difficult truth, all within one set of borders.
Chapter One
Kruger's Dawn Game Drives
Kruger National Park is vast enough, nearly two million hectares, that self-driving visitors can spot the Big Five without ever booking a formal safari, though a guided drive with a ranger who reads tracks and alarm calls will always find more. I set out at 5:30am from Skukuza with a tracker named Elias who spotted a leopard's paw print in the road dust that I would have driven straight over. Twenty minutes later we found her draped along a marula branch, a impala kill wedged in the fork above her. Kruger's private reserves along its western border, Sabi Sands especially, offer closer, quieter encounters for a price, but the public park itself remains one of the most accessible serious wildlife experiences on the continent.
“South Africa will not let you enjoy its beauty without also showing you its scars.”
Chapter Two
Cape Town's Layered Present
I took the ferry to Robben Island on a grey morning with a former political prisoner as our guide, who showed us the lime quarry where inmates' eyesight was permanently damaged and the small cell where Mandela read law by a sliver of light. Returning to the mainland, the city's beauty, Table Mountain's flat top wreathed in cloud, the Atlantic slamming into Camps Bay, felt almost too immediate a contrast. In Bo-Kaap, the brightly painted Cape Malay quarter, I ate koeksisters from a home cook who has sold them from her stoep for thirty years. Cape Town asks visitors to hold beauty and history together without letting either one cancel the other out.
The Short List
Do not miss in South Africa
At a glance
South Africa in numbers
- Capital
- Pretoria (administrative), Cape Town (legislative), Bloemfontein (judicial)
- Language
- isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, and seven others
- Currency
- South African Rand
- Best time
- May to September for safari, November to February for the Cape
Did you know
South Africa has three capital cities, one for each branch of government, and eleven official languages, more than any other country.