South Africa: A world of possibilities, beyond the World Cup

last updated 8 January 2015

Getting to know Soweto

During this year’s FIFA World Cup tournament, which starts June 11, Johannesburg’s Soccer City Stadium will be the “center of the universe,” said Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. But the urban townships of Soweto are where visitors can get a real feel for South Africa’s largest city. Established in the early 20th century as a settlement for black male laborers, Soweto became a byword for “profound poverty,” but also received global attention for its residents’ role in the battle against the country’s racist apartheid regime. Sign up for a tour of today’s Soweto, and you can walk down Vilakazi Street, where former President Nelson Mandela lived during the ’40s and ’50s—and where Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu now resides. I “took away a more personal impression” from our visit to Motsoaledi Informal Settlement, a squatters’ camp where roughly 20,000 people still live in extreme poverty. Afterward I got a lift—in more ways than one—when we ascended the Orlando Towers, a mural-adorned pair of concrete cooling towers that have been rigged for bungee jumping and “something called ‘power swinging,’” which is similar to rappelling. From atop the towers, I could see Tutu’s house. I took a step, then plunged in free fall for 3.5 seconds before my descent slowed and I caught a sweeping view of all of Johannesburg.

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South Africa encompasses a vast diversity of climates, ranging from the extreme desert of the southern Namib to the subtropical eastern shore known as the Wild Coast, said Robyn Dixon in the Chicago Tribune. Bordering the Indian Ocean, the Wild Coast remains a relatively untouched paradise whose dramatic scenery includes lush, “spectacular headlands,” waterfalls that tumble into the sea, and “deserted beaches” with rich, honey-colored sand. Start a cruise up the coast in Durban, a beach city that’s “balmy even in the winter.” The largest metropolis along the Eastern Cape province, Durban boasts a long beachfront known as the Golden Mile. Lined with jazz bars, art deco buildings, and “colorful art and craft shops,” it bustles day and night. You can follow the “wide, sandy beaches” 100 miles north to Umhlanga Rocks, a small resort town whose shore stretches all the way up to the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, this “sweeping subtropical reserve” hosts hippos, Nile crocodiles, and a spectacular diversity of coral.

Come face to face with a “big, scary great white shark” in Gansbaai, said Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post. This coastal town, two and a half hours southwest of Cape Town by car, brings you “closer to one of the planet’s top predators than you can get almost anywhere else on Earth.” I signed up for a dive with Shark Lady Adventures and set off on a 30-foot catamaran for an area known as “Shark Alley,” where great whites congregate in search of seal pups that live on nearby Dyer Island. As we approached the spot, my “visibly nervous” boat mates and I put on our masks and snorkels and were lowered into a large steel cage coated in rubber. We were each placed in a stall in what seemed like a “small, underwater horse stable” and told to keep our fingers and toes inside. As the guide informed us of an approaching shark, I submerged my head and saw its “torpedo-shaped” body gracefully glide just inches from me. The water was so clear that I could “see its every move” as the shark circled back for the chum, opened its jaws, “flashed its ragged-looking teeth”—and went in for a kill.

A six-day rail journey aboard the Pride of Africa offers an unmatched “combination of adventure, luxury, and education,” said William Ecenbarger in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Such a train ride, starting at Cape Town in the southwest and ending at Polokwane in the country’s far northeast, is the “centerpiece” of Smithsonian Journeys’ two-week tour through South Africa. Stepping into a rail car from a “red-carpeted platform,” I was greeted by a violin trio and “white-jacketed waiters serving flutes of Champagne.” The lavish accommodations have been “fully restored to Edwardian elegance,” exemplified by a dining car adorned with mahogany tables with damask cloths and stocked with a selection of South African wines. The journey took us across South Africa’s “spectacular heartland”: past the rolling vineyards of the Hex River Valley, along the “diamond-studded” mines of Kimberley and the preserved Victorian houses of Matjiesfontein, through the tree-lined neighborhoods of Pretoria, and finally across the “primordial landscape” of the Great Karoo desert. At every stop along this “route to discovery,” we learned something new about a fascinating nation.

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