Jewels of Southern Africa

“The whole town,” Captain Cook wrote in 1771 about Cape Town, “may be consider’d as one great Inn fitted up for the recreation of all comers and goers.” The great voyager may as well have been writing this week: Cape Town is one of the world’s jazziest, most fascinatingly multicultural and downright beautiful cities, a magnet for discerning goers and comers from six continents. We’ll have an electrically relaxed few days to explore this dynamic, cosmopolitan city, based from the incomparable One&Only, set on the bustling Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, looking up at Table Mountain, which we will summit via the famed Aerial Cableway, a spectacular bit of engineering in service to an even more spectacular view. We’ll spend a little heart-lifting time helping out at one of Micato-AmericaShare’s programmes for Cape Town’s less fortunate at Red Hill. And we’ll wander out to the Cape Winelands for tastings and relaxed meals at places like the sublime Delaire Graff and Waterford Wine Estates. The Winelands charms us with brisk and picture-pretty little towns, a variety of refreshing activities, and lovely scenery reminiscent of Northern California’s Wine Country (except the craggy mountains that shoot up from its vineyards make Sonoma and Napa’s look rather modest in comparison).

And we’ll head over to the Cape of Good Hope, around which much of the world’s history once turned, and which a dissimilar cohort of creatures—including penguins, zebras, and ostriches—happily call home.

The very private, very beautiful Sabi Sand Game Reserve is one of our favourite African places. Adjacent to Kruger National Park, the 240 square-mile Sabi Sand is home to all of Kruger’s famously rich roster of animals, who wander freely between Sabi Sand and the much more humanly thronged national park. Much is rightfully made— by us and by just about every Africa-lover— of the Big Five superstars, who are all here in their charismatic glory. But Sabi Sand’s 140 or so other animal species are equally fascinating: cheetahs, relentlessly crafty hyenas, giraffes, Op Art zebras, and ebullient Cape wild dogs, to mention just a few.

Our domicile for four leisurely nights is the Tengile River Lodge, set in a riverside forest, soothingly intimate (with only nine, thoughtfully luxurious suites, each with a private plunge pool), conveniently modern (and solar-powered), a lovely place from which to explore a surpassingly lovely corner of Africa.

“Poor Niagara,” Eleanor Roosevelt supposedly said upon viewing Brazil and Argentina’s Iguazu Falls. Had she gazed on Victoria Falls—the greatest curtain of water on earth, 60 tumultuous feet higher than its South American rival—the famously articulate First Lady might have been struck speechless. Victoria Falls is a waterfall like no other, and during our stay at the legendary Royal Livingstone Hotel we’ll get to know the Falls, helicoptering over them on the famed Flight of Angels, savouring early-morning, coffee-sipping views from our room’s veranda of the almost 1,000 feet of mist that rise from the watery cauldron to lazy afternoon sundowners near its dramatic precipice, contemplating what the greatest travel writer of all time, Richard Halliburton, called “a hurricane of bursting water. . . that seems to fall up, not down.”

We fly from Livingstone to Johannesburg, and on to a day room in the InterContinental at Johannesburg’s airport, and connect with our international flight home, arriving on Day 13.