Given South Africa’s booming tourism industry, it’s not surprising that you’ll have no difficulty finding
maps,
books and
brochures before you leave. South African Tourism, the official organization promoting the country, is reasonably efficient: if there’s an office near you, it’s worth visiting for its free maps and
information on hotels and organized tours. Alternatively, you can check out its
website wwww.southafrica.net, which includes content specific to users in South Africa, the UK, the US, Canada, Germany and France.
In South Africa itself, nearly every town, even down to the sleepiest dorp, has some sort of tourist office – sometimes connected to the museum, municipal offices or library – where you can pick up local maps, lists of B&Bs and travel advice. In larger cities such as Cape Town and Durban, you’ll find several branches offering everything from hotel bookings to organized safari trips. We’ve given precise opening hours of tourist offices in most cases; they generally adhere to a standard schedule of Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm, with many offices also open on Saturdays and Sundays. In smaller towns some close between 1pm and 2pm, while in the bigger centres some have extended hours.
In this fast-changing country the best way of finding out what’s happening is often by word of mouth, and for this, backpacker hostels are invaluable. If you’re seeing South Africa on a budget, the useful notice boards, constant traveller traffic and largely helpful and friendly staff in the hostels will greatly smooth your travels.
To find out what’s on, check out the entertainment pages of the daily newspapers or better still buy the Mail & Guardian, which comes out every Friday and lists the coming week’s offerings in a comprehensive pullout supplement.
Travellers with disabilities
Facilities for
disabled travellers in South Africa are not as sophisticated as those found in the developed world, but they’re sufficient to ensure you have a satisfactory visit. By accident rather than design, you’ll find pretty good
accessibility to many buildings, as South Africans tend to build low (single-storey bungalows are the norm), with the result that you’ll have to deal with fewer
stairs than you may be accustomed to. As the car is king, you’ll frequently find that you can drive to, and park right outside, your destination. There are organized
tours and
holidays specifically for people with disabilities, and activity-based packages for disabled travellers to South Africa are increasingly available. These packages offer the possibility for wheelchair-bound visitors to take part in safaris, sport and a vast range of adventure
activities, including whitewater rafting, horseriding, parasailing and zip-lining. Tours can either be taken as self-drive trips or as packages for large groups. The contacts mentioned in the directory will be able to put you in touch with South Africa travel specialists.
If you want to be more independent on your travels, it’s important to know where you can expect help and where you must be self-reliant, especially regarding transport and accommodation. It’s also vital to know your limitations, and to make sure others know them. If you do not use a wheelchair all the time but your walking capabilities are limited, remember that you are likely to need to cover greater distances while travelling (often over rougher terrain and in hotter temperatures) than you are used to. If you use a wheelchair, have it serviced before you go and take a repair kit with you.
Travelling with children
Travelling with
children is straightforward in South Africa, whether you want to explore a city, relax on the beach, or find peace in the mountains. You’ll find local people friendly, attentive and accepting of babies and young children. The following is aimed mainly at families with under-5s.
Although children up to 24 months only pay ten percent of the adult airfare, the illusion that this is a bargain rapidly evaporates when you discover that they get no seat or baggage allowance. Given this, you’d be well advised to secure bulkhead seats and reserve a basinet or sky cot, which can be attached to the bulkhead. Basinets are usually allocated to babies under six months, though some airlines use weight (under 10kg) as the criterion. When you reconfirm your flights, check that your seat and basinet are still available. A child who has a seat will usually be charged fifty percent of the adult fare and is entitled to a full baggage allowance.
For getting to and from the aircraft, and for use during your stay, take a lightweight collapsible buggy – not counted as part of your luggage allowance. A child-carrier backpack is another useful accessory.
Given the size of the country, you’re likely to be driving long distances. Aim to go slowly and plan a route that allows frequent stops – or perhaps take trains or flights between centres. The Garden Route, for example, is an ideal drive, with easy stops for picnics, particularly on the section between Mossel Bay and Storms River. The route between Johannesburg and Cape Town, conversely, is tedious.
Game viewing can be boring for young children, since it too involves a lot of driving – and disappointment, should the promised beasts fail to put in an appearance. Furthermore, of course, toddlers won’t particularly enjoy watching animals from afar and through a window. If they are old enough to enjoy the experience, make sure they have their own binoculars. To get in closer, some animal parks, such as Tshukudu near Kruger, have semi-tame animals, while snake and reptile parks are an old South African favourite.
Family accommodation is plentiful, and hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs and a growing number of backpacker lodges have rooms with extra beds or interconnecting rooms. Kids usually stay for half-price. Self-catering options are worth considering, as most such establishments have a good deal of space to play in, and there’ll often be a pool. A number of resorts are specifically aimed at families with older children, with suitable activities offered. The pick of the bunch is the Forever chain (wwww.foreversa.co.za), which has resorts in beautiful settings, including Keurboomstrand near Plettenberg Bay, and two close to the Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga. Another excellent option is full-board family hotels, of which there are a number along the Wild Coast, where not only are there playgrounds and canoes for paddling about lagoons, but also often nannies to look after the kids during meals or for the whole day. Note that many safari camps don’t allow children under 12, so you’ll have to self-cater or camp at the national parks and those in KwaZulu-Natal.
Eating out with a baby or toddler is easy, particularly if you go to an outdoor venue where they can get on unhindered with their exploration of the world. Some restaurants have highchairs and offer small portions. If in doubt, there are always the ubiquitous family-oriented chains such as Spur, Nando’s or Wimpy.
Breast-feeding is practised by the majority of African mothers wherever they are, though you won’t see many white women doing it in public. Be discreet, especially in more conservative areas – which is most of the country outside middle-class Cape Town, Johannesburg or Durban. There are relatively few baby rooms in public places for changing or feeding, although the situation is improving all the time and you shouldn’t have a problem at shopping malls in the cities. You can buy disposable nappies wherever you go (imported brands are best), as well as wipes, bottles, formula and dummies. High-street chemists and the Clicks chain are the best places to buy baby goods. If you run out of clothes, the Woolworths chain has good-quality stuff, while the ubiquitous Pep stores, which are present in even the smallest towns, are an excellent source of extremely cheap, functional clothes.
Malaria affects only a small part of the country, but think carefully about visiting such areas as the preventatives aren’t recommended for under-2s. Avoid most of the major game reserves, particularly the Kruger National Park and those in KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo provinces, and opt instead for malaria-free reserves – Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape is an excellent choice. Malarial zones carry a considerably reduced risk in winter, so if you are set on going, this is the best time. Tuberculosis (TB) is widespread in South Africa, mostly (but by no means exclusively) affecting the poor, so make sure your child has had a BCG jab. Sun protection is another important consideration.
South Africa lacks a strong tradition of national newspapers and instead has many regional publications of varying quality. Television delivers a mix of imported programmes and home-grown soaps heavily modelled on US fare, as well as the odd home-grown reality TV show and one or two watchable documentary slots. Radio is where South Africa is finding it easiest to meet the needs of a diverse and scattered audience, and deregulation of the airwaves has brought to life scores of small new stations.
Newspapers
Of the roughly twenty daily newspapers, most of which are published in English or Afrikaans, the only two that qualify as nationals are Business Day (
www.businessday.co.za), which is a good source of serious national and international news, and The New Age, which is aligned with the government.
Each of the larger cities has its own English-language broadsheet, most of them published by South Africa’s largest newspaper publisher, Independent News & Media, a subsidiary of the Irish company that owns London’s Independent newspaper and the Irish Independent. In Johannesburg, The Star (www.thestar.co.za), the group’s South African flagship, has a roughly equal number of black and white readers and offers somewhat uninspired Jo’burg coverage, padded out with international bits and pieces piped in from Dublin and London. Cape Town’s morning Cape Times (www.capetimes.co.za) and Cape Argus (www.capeargus.co.za), published in the afternoon, follow broadly the same tried (and tired) formula, as do the Pretoria News (www.pretorianews.co.za), the Herald (www.theherald.co.za) in Port Elizabeth and the Daily News (www.dailynews.co.za) in Durban.
The country’s biggest-selling paper is the Daily Sun, a Jo’burg-based tabloid that taps into the concerns of township dwellers, with a giddy cocktail of gruesome crime stories, tales of witchcraft and the supernatural, and coverage of the everyday problems of ordinary people. Another Jo’burg tabloid is the Sowetan (www.sowetan.co.za), which has been going since the 1980s, but is a far more serious publication than the Sun. In Cape Town, the studiedly sleazy Voice attempts to emulate the Sun in the coloured community, with a downbeat mixture of crime, the supernatural and sex advice.
Unquestionably the country’s intellectual heavyweight, the Mail & Guardian (www.mg.co.za), published every Friday, frequently delivers nonpartisan and fearless investigative journalism, but at times tends towards the turgid.
The Sunday Times (www.sundaytimes.co.za), on the other hand, can attribute its sales – roughly half a million copies – to its well-calculated mix of investigative reporting, gossipy stories and rewrites of salacious scandal lifted from foreign tabloids, while the Sunday Independent (www.sundayindependent.co.za), from the Independent stable, projects a more thoughtful image but is a bit thin.
The easiest places to buy newspapers are corner stores and newsagents, especially the CNA chain. These outlets also sell international publications such as Time, Newsweek, The Economist and the weekly overseas editions of the British Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Express – you’ll also find copies of the daily and weekend international editions of the Financial Times.
Television
The South Africa Broadcasting Corporation’s three TV channels churn out a mixed bag of domestic dramas, sport, game shows, soaps and documentaries, filled out with lashings of familiar imports. SABC 1, 2 and 3 share the unenviable task of trying to deliver an integrated service, while having to split their time between the eleven official languages. English turns out to be most widely used, with SABC 3 (
www.sabc3.co.za) broadcasting almost exclusively in the language, with a high proportion of British and US comedies and dramas, while SABC 2 (
www.sabc2.co.za) and SABC 1 (
www.sabc1.co.za) spread themselves thinly across all the remaining ten languages with a fair amount of English creeping in too. SABC 1, with its high proportion of sports coverage, has the most viewers.
South Africa’s first and only free-to-air independent commercial channel e.tv (www.etv.co.za) won its franchise in 1998 on the promise of providing a showcase for local productions, a pledge it has signally failed to meet.
There is no cable TV in South Africa, but DSTV (www.dstv.co.za) offers a satellite television subscription service with a selection of sports, movies, news and specialist channels, some of which are piped into hotels.
Radio
Given South Africa’s low literacy rate and widespread poverty, it’s no surprise that radio is its most popular medium. The SABC operates a national radio station for each of the eleven official language groups. The English-language service, SAfm (
www.safm.co.za), is increasingly degenerating into tedious wall-to-wall talk shows interspersed with news. The SABC also runs 5FM Stereo, a national pop station broadcasting Top 40 tracks, while its Radio Metro is targeted at black urban listeners.
To get a taste of what makes South Africans tick, tune into the privately owned Gauteng talk station 702 (in Jo’burg 92.7 FM and in Pretoria 106 FM; www.702.co.za) or its Cape Town sister station CapeTalk (567 AM; www.capetalk.co.za), both of which are a lot livelier than the state stations and broadcast news, weather, traffic and sports reports. Apart from these, there are scores of regional, commercial and community stations, broadcasting a range of music and other material, which makes surfing the airwaves an enjoyable experience, wherever you are in the country.