Southern Africa Cultural Journey: Cities, Rivers, Wildlife and Memory on a 19-Day Route

Most journeys through Southern Africa are sold as a string of highlights: a mountain, a waterfall, a game drive. Followed from end to end, though, the route from Cape Town to Johannesburg tells one long, connected story. It begins with a Dutch trading station built to feed ships, moves through farming country made rich by a fashion for feathers, climbs to a city founded on gold, crosses parks where wildlife is managed as carefully as any farm, reaches the Zambezi at Victoria Falls, and ends in Soweto, where the country’s constitutional ideals were first written down. This is the shape of our Southern Africa Tour, a 19-day Southern Africa cultural tour through South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and this guide follows it stage by stage.

Reading a Southern Africa cultural tour as connected landscapes

It helps to think of the route as six landscapes, each shaped by people as much as by nature. The Cape is a maritime landscape, made by sea lanes and the ships that used them. The Klein Karoo and the Garden Route are farming and coastal landscapes, shaped by markets far away. Johannesburg is a mining landscape, a city that would not exist without gold. Kruger and Chobe are protected landscapes, wild in appearance but carefully managed. The Zambezi is a river landscape on a vast scale. And Soweto and Constitution Hill are landscapes of memory, where the country remembers how it was governed and how that changed.

None of these stands alone. The wine of Constantia and the feathers of Oudtshoorn travelled on the same ships to the same European markets; the gold of Johannesburg paid for much of the country’s modern infrastructure; the parks were shaped by the politics of the states that created them. For the broader historical sweep behind all of this, our history of South Africa for travellers is a good companion read before you go.

Cape Town: a station built to feed ships

The tour begins where colonial South Africa began. On 6 April 1652, Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay with orders from the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) to set up a refreshment station: fresh water, vegetables, meat and medical care for ships sailing between Europe and Asia. Everything that followed in Cape Town grew out of that modest purpose.

Day 2 heads south down the peninsula to Cape Point and the Good Hope Nature Reserve, a headland of fynbos and shipwrecks that shows exactly why sailors needed a safe harbour so badly. In the afternoon the group turns inland to the valley where Governor Simon van der Stel planted vines in the 1680s. Our article on the Constantia wine route follows that valley from a governor’s farm to the sweet wine European courts prized, and the enslaved people who made it.

Day 3 is a full day in the city. It starts at the Castle of Good Hope, the five-pointed VOC fort that is the oldest surviving colonial building in the country, then rises by revolving cable car to the top of Table Mountain (or Signal Hill if the weather closes in). The afternoon takes in the Company’s Garden, once the station’s vegetable garden, the Bo-Kaap, Greenmarket Square and the V&A Waterfront.

The Klein Karoo: feathers, caves and a farming boom

On Day 4 the route leaves the coast for the Klein Karoo, a dry valley between mountain ranges where the town of Oudtshoorn once grew rich on ostrich feathers. Feathers were the fashion of the Edwardian age, and by 1913 they were among the Union’s most valuable exports. Farmers who prospered built extravagant sandstone townhouses, still known as the feather palaces. Then, around the outbreak of the First World War, the market collapsed. Our article on Oudtshoorn ostrich farms looks at the boom, the bust and how ostrich farming has adapted since.

The same afternoon brings the Cango Caves, a limestone cave system in the foothills of the Swartberg. Stone Age people sheltered in its entrance long before the first recorded colonial exploration in 1780. Only a part of the system is open to visitors, and the group takes the shorter heritage route through its great dripstone chambers rather than the adventure route with its tight squeezes. The first great chamber, Van Zyl’s Hall, is named after Jacobus van Zyl, who led that 1780 exploration with a local teacher and a herder named Klaas Windvogel; some accounts credit Windvogel with finding the cave in the first place. It is a reminder that even the history of discovery here has more than one version.

Knysna and the Garden Route coast

From the Karoo the road crosses back to the coast at Knysna, where a broad lagoon opens to the Indian Ocean between two sandstone headlands, the Knysna Heads. Day 5 is spent at the Featherbed Nature Reserve on the Western Head, a privately owned reserve that can only be reached by ferry across the lagoon. A guided walk and a picnic lunch give time to look closely at coastal fynbos and thicket, and at how a fragile, fire-prone landscape is looked after. The reserve opened to visitors in 1984 and was badly burned in the Knysna fires of 2017, so its recovering vegetation is itself part of the lesson.

Day 6 is spent at Birds of Eden and the Monkeyland Primate Sanctuary, two sanctuaries along the Garden Route. For more on the wider coast, from its forests to its small towns, see our guide to South Africa’s Garden Route.

Johannesburg: a city built on gold

Day 7 moves the story inland to the Highveld and to Johannesburg, a city that did not exist before 1886. That year a prospector found the outcrop of the main gold reef on the farm Langlaagte, and within months a mining camp was spreading across the ridge of the Witwatersrand. By 1898 the Transvaal was the largest gold producer in the world. The pale, flat-topped mine dumps that still mark the city’s edges are the clearest sign of where its wealth came from.

The half-day city tour runs from the northern suburbs of Sandton and Houghton, past Nelson Mandela’s former home, through Hillbrow, Braamfontein and the old mining-house district of Newtown and Main Street, to the viewing deck on the 50th floor of the Carlton Centre. It also stops at Constitution Hill, where a prison complex that once held Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela now surrounds the Constitutional Court, opened in 2004 and built in part with bricks from the demolished cells. Our introduction to Johannesburg covers more of the city’s history and neighbourhoods.

Constitution Hill repays time. The Old Fort was built around an earlier prison in the late 1890s on the orders of Paul Kruger’s government. Number Four, the section for Black men, was built in 1902, and a Women’s Gaol followed in 1909; among the women held there were Winnie Mandela and Albertina Sisulu. The prison closed in 1983. Placing the country’s highest court for constitutional matters on this site was a deliberate choice: the place where rights were most openly denied now houses the institution charged with protecting them.

Pretoria and the politics of memory

Day 8 is a day trip north to Pretoria (Tshwane), the administrative capital, with lunch in the city. The main visit is the Voortrekker Monument, a massive monument on a hill outside the city, designed by Gerard Moerdijk and inaugurated on 16 December 1949. It commemorates the Voortrekkers who left the Cape Colony between 1835 and 1854, and its marble frieze tells their story in 27 panels. It is also, inescapably, a monument to Afrikaner nationalism: it was inaugurated by Prime Minister D. F. Malan. Reading it carefully, alongside Constitution Hill the day before, is one of the most rewarding exercises of the trip. The day also includes Kruger House, the former residence of the Transvaal president Paul Kruger.

Kruger: managing a wilderness

On Day 9 the group flies from Johannesburg to Nelspruit and continues to a lodge on the edge of Kruger National Park, in time for an evening game drive with the lodge ranger. Day 10 brings an early-morning drive, a free morning at the lodge and a second evening drive.

Kruger looks like wilderness, but it has a long history of management. The area was first protected by the South African Republic in 1898, and the national park was created in 1926. For much of the twentieth century, park managers drilled boreholes and built dams to keep water available year-round; from the late 1990s, as thinking changed, many of those boreholes were closed. In 2002 part of the fence along the Mozambique border came down to form the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Our article on Kruger National Park conservation explores these choices, and our guide to visiting South Africa’s game reserves covers what a day on safari involves.

The scale is easy to underestimate. Kruger covers nearly two million hectares, about 19,500 square kilometres. The Olifants and Letaba rivers cross it from west to east, the Olifants roughly cutting it in two, while the Sabie and Crocodile rivers mark its southern reaches and the Limpopo and Luvuvhu its far north. Rivers like these, and the access animals have to them, shape much of what you see on a drive.

The Panorama Route: reading the escarpment

Day 11 climbs onto the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment along the Panorama Route. At God’s Window the cliffs fall away hundreds of metres to the Lowveld below. At Bourke’s Luck Potholes, named after a gold prospector, swirling water has drilled smooth cylindrical holes into the rock where two rivers meet. And from the rim of the Blyde River Canyon, one of the largest canyons on Earth, the Three Rondavels stand out across the gorge: three round, grass-topped peaks of hard quartzite and shale, named for their likeness to traditional round houses. The rivers here now also carry their new official names, the Motlatse and the Sefogane.

The Zambezi at Victoria Falls

On Day 12 the route crosses into Zimbabwe and reaches the Zambezi. Victoria Falls is about 1,708 metres wide, and at its deepest the water drops 108 metres into a narrow chasm. Its older name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means the smoke that thunders, after the column of spray that can be seen from far away. The first European on record to see it was David Livingstone, in November 1855, and the falls have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, shared by Zambia and Zimbabwe, since 1989.

The geology is as striking as the view. The Zambezi runs across layered basalt, and over a very long time the falls have retreated upstream along lines of weakness in the rock, leaving a zigzag of steep-sided gorges below. Our article on Victoria Falls geology explains how that process works. Below the falls the river has cut eight of these gorges, zigzagging for many kilometres downstream, and each one marks a former position of the falls. Two days with a local guide take in the viewpoints of the rainforest on the Zimbabwe side, including the Knife Edge Bridge, the Falls Bridge and the Lookout Tree.

Chobe: elephants and the river

Days 14 to 16 are spent in northern Botswana, in and around Chobe National Park, established in 1967 as the country’s first national park. Chobe is known for one of the largest concentrations of elephants in Africa, and in the dry months they gather along the Chobe River to drink and cross. Our article on Chobe National Park elephants looks at how and why they move, and what that means for conservation in the region.

Here the river becomes the best place to watch from. The programme includes game drives, a sunset cruise on Day 15 and a morning cruise on Day 16, both with the ranger. A boat changes what you notice: hippos and crocodiles at the waterline, birds on the reed beds, elephants swimming between the floodplain islands. Our guide to the Chobe River cruise explains how to read the river from the water.

Soweto and Kliptown: constitutional memory

On Day 17 the group flies from Kasane back to Johannesburg, and Day 18 is spent in Soweto. The half-day tour begins in Kliptown, where on 26 June 1955 the Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter, whose opening declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. The site is now Walter Sisulu Square. Our article on the Freedom Charter in Kliptown follows the charter’s language into the constitution adopted four decades later.

The tour continues past the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela’s first Johannesburg home, and ends at the Hector Pieterson Memorial, which remembers the 12-year-old shot by police on 16 June 1976, when Soweto’s students protested against the forced use of Afrikaans in their schools. For more on the township itself, see our guide to Soweto for travellers. The tour ends after breakfast on Day 19.

How many game drives and river cruises are included?

The itinerary includes five game drives and two boat cruises. In Kruger there is an evening drive on Day 9 and a morning and an evening drive on Day 10. In Chobe there is an evening drive on Day 14 and a morning drive on Day 15, followed by a sunset cruise on the Chobe River that evening and a morning cruise on Day 16. Drives are led by the lodge rangers, and sightings are never guaranteed.

What season does the tour travel in, and does it matter?

It does. The tour departs in late August, with dates from 29 August to 15 September 2027 and from 27 August to 13 September 2028. That is the late dry season inland, when grass is low and wildlife gathers near water, which is why elephants concentrate along the Chobe River at this time of year. At Victoria Falls, the Zambezi is falling after its April peak, so the spray is lighter and more of the rock face shows. At the Cape, it is the end of winter and the start of spring.

How fit do I need to be for this tour?

Moderately fit. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of physical activity a day, walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground, using stairs and carrying your own luggage. Game drives and boat cruises are seated, but early starts are common. Porterage fees are included, and the route uses internal flights for the longest legs, including Johannesburg to Nelspruit and Kasane to Johannesburg.

How the route fits together

The tour stays in 3- and 4-star hotels and game lodges for 18 nights, travels in an air-conditioned coach with local guides and a Tour Leader, and includes 18 breakfasts, 6 lunches and 11 dinners. For an introduction to the countries of the region beyond this route, our guide to exploring Southern Africa covers the wider picture.

What makes the route rewarding is the way each stage explains the next. The supply station at the Cape needed farms; the farms fed markets; the markets and then the mines built cities; the cities created states, and the states made parks and monuments; and in Kliptown and on Constitution Hill, the country rewrote the terms on which all of it is shared. Nineteen days is long enough to see that story unfold, and to come home with a much clearer sense of how Southern Africa came to be.