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South Africa is a large, diverse and incredibly beautiful country. It varies from the picturesque Garden Route towns of the Western Cape to the raw subtropical coast of northern KwaZulu-Natal. The vast Karoo semi-desert stretches across its centre, while one of Africa’s premier safari destinations, Kruger National Park, sprawls along the northeast border. The big cities attract immigrants from across the continent, making them great, bubbling cultural crucibles. Read our South Africa guide for everything you need to know before you go.
Each of the nine provinces has compelling reasons to visit, whether that’s wildlife, beaches, culture or urban life. However, depending on the time of year and your interests, you’d be wise to concentrate on either the west or the east.
Here are some of the best places to visit in South Africa:
Peak season is from December to January and at Easter, when prices soar and accommodation is booked up months in advance, especially along the coast and around national parks. If you’re travelling to South Africa for its iconic creatures, spring is best for whale-spotting while autumn onwards is perfect for wildlife-watching.
June to August is rainy season in Cape Town and the Western Cape, though prices are low and these are great months to visit South Africa’s arid areas, like the Karoo.
Read our guide on the best time to travel to South Africa.
From North America, there are a relatively small number of nonstop flights into Johannesburg; your best bet is a direct flight from New York (JFK) and Washington (via a refuel stop in West Africa). There are no direct flights from Canada; you’ll have to change planes in the US, Europe or Asia, with journey times that can last over thirty hours.
Read more in our South Africa travel guide.
Despite the large distances, travelling around South Africa is mostly straightforward. There’s a reasonably well-organized bus and train network, plenty of car rental companies and well-connected internal flights. The only weak point is public transport in urban areas, which is mostly poor and dangerous with the exceptions of Johannesburg’s Gautrain and Cape Town’s MyCiTi bus and Metrorail Southern Line.
Renting a car is the easiest and safest option for your South Africa trip. Besides, short of joining a tour, the only way to reach national parks and the more remote coastal areas is by car. However, flying between destinations compares favourably with the cost of covering long distances in a rental car and overnighting en route.
If you ask most people why travel to South Africa, and they’ll mention the wine. South Africa is one of the world’s top ten wine-making countries, producing particularly fine New World wines.
Read our South Africa guide to food and drink.
South Africa’s population doesn’t reduce simply to black and white. Over 80 percent of the population are black Africans, while white people make up just under nine percent, as do coloured people – the mixed-race descendants – the mixed-race descendants of white settlers, slaves from Southeast Asia and Africans. The rest are mostly Indians (2.5 percent), resident mainly in KwaZulu-Natal and descended from indentured labourers, who came to South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century.
But perhaps a better indication of South Africa’s diversity is the plethora of official languages, most of which represent distinct cultures with rural roots in different corners of the country. Each region has its own particular style of architecture, craftwork, food 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.
From travel safety to visa requirements, discover the best tips for visiting South Africa
Despite horror stories of sky-high crime rates, most people visit South Africa without incident. Be careful, but not paranoid. This is not to underestimate the issue – crime is probably the most serious problem facing the country. But some perspective is in order: crime is disproportionately concentrated in the poor African and coloured townships.
Violent crime is a problem throughout Johannesburg, from the city centre to the townships, and travellers are most at risk here. However, the greatest peril facing most visitors is navigating South Africa’s roads, which claim well over 10,000 lives a year.
Some basic South Africa travel tips include avoid wearing expensive jewellery and watches and avoid carrying excessive sums of money or a camera. Don’t put your wallet in your back trouser pocket, or leave valuables exposed. Lock your car doors while driving, especially in cities and don’t walk alone at night.
Read more South Africa travel advice to help you enjoy a stress-free trip.
Citizens of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Argentina, Brazil and most European countries do not need a visa for trips to South Africa of up to 90 days. The exceptions being citizens from Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, who need to obtain one at a South African diplomatic mission in their home country. Everyone who visits South Africa needs a valid passport and proof of a return ticket (or onward travel documents) and a bank statement showing sufficient funds to cover their stay. Though rare, immigration officers do on occasion ask to see these documents. If you are planning to travel to South Africa alone with a child, you must obtain a notarized document certifying both parents’ permission. All children travelling to South Africa will be expected to show an unabridged (full) birth certificate.
Informed by the generals that apartheid couldn't be preserved purely through force, Botha embarked on his Total Strategy, reforming peripheral aspects of apartheid while fostering a black middle class as a buffer against the ANC. He also pumped vast sums into building an enormous military machine that crossed South Africa's borders to bully or crush neighbouring countries harbouring anti-apartheid activists. At home, security forces were free to murder, maim and torture opponents of apartheid.
Botha's iron fist proved his undoing when, in 1985, he responded to international calls for change by hinting that he would announce significant political reforms at his party congress. In the event, out of fear of a white backlash, or just bloody-minded intransigence, he shrank away from meaningful concessions. The result was an immediate and devastating flight of capital from the country, a withdrawal of credit by Chase Manhattan Bank and intensified sanctions.
Botha blustered on through the late 1980s, while his bloated military sucked the state coffers dry. Even National Party stalwarts realized that his policies were leading to ruin, and in 1989, when he suffered a stroke, the party was quick to replace him with F.W. de Klerk, who swiftly announced reforms.
Botha lived out his unrepentant retirement near George, declining ever to apologize for the political crimes committed by his administration. Curiously, when he died in 2006, he was given an uncritical, high-profile state funeral, broadcast on national television and attended by members of the government, including then-president, Thabo Mbeki.
Signs of the emergence of a new Southern African dialect appeared as early as 1685, when a Dutch East India Company official from the Netherlands complained about a "distorted and incomprehensible" version of Dutch being spoken around modern-day Paarl. By absorbing English, French, German, Malay and indigenous words and expressions, the language continued to diverge from mainstream Dutch, and by the nineteenth century was widely used in the Cape by both white and coloured speakers, but was looked down on by the elite.
In 1905, Gustav Preller, a young journalist from a working-class Boer background, set about reinventing Afrikaans as a "white man's language". He aimed to eradicate the stigma of its "coloured" ties by substituting Dutch words for those with non-European origins. Preller began publishing the first of a series of populist magazines written in Afrikaans and glorifying Boer history and culture. Pressure grew for the recognition of Afrikaans as an official language, which came in 1925.
When the National Party took power in 1948, its apartheid policy went hand in hand with promoting the interests of its Afrikaans-speaking supporters. Afrikaners were installed throughout the civil service and filled most posts in the public utilities. Despite there being more coloured than white Afrikaans speakers, the language quickly became associated with the apartheid establishment. This led directly to the Soweto uprising of 1976, when the government attempted to enforce Afrikaans as the sole medium of instruction in African schools. At the same time, the repression of the 1970s and 1980s and the forced removals under the Group Areas Act led many coloured Afrikaans speakers to adopt English in preference to their tainted mother tongue.
There are few signs that Afrikaans will die out, though. Under the new constitution, existing language rights can't be diminished, which effectively means that Afrikaans will continue to be almost as widely used as before. But it is now as much with coloured as white people that the future of the taal (language) rests.