Barberton, a small unassuming town in Mpumalanga’s Kruger Lowveld region, is world-famous for two different reasons. The first is for Golden Quarry, the world’s richest gold mine, where as the joke goes the rock had to be removed from the gold! The second, and more significant, is for the treasures of the Barberton Geotrail. The…
South Africa is a big country with a huge range of attractions. Whether you are looking to combine a visit to KwaZulu-Natal with other destinations in South Africa, or simply have limited time on your trip, we know it’s hard to fit it all in – and let’s face it, you simply can’t. While there is…
Ithala Game Reserve is one of the only big-game national parks that allows visitors the unique opportunity to do self-guided hiking trails. This was something we took full advantage of during our Ultimate South African Road Trip, and something you should too. Highlights Ithala Game Reserve Ithala Game Reserve is a lesser-known national park just outside…
The famous Sani Pass that links South Africa with Lesotho is one of the few vehicle access routes onto the great uKhahlamba escarpment. The spectacular “Barrier of Spears” has always proved to be a challenge to negotiate. Despite recent improvements in the road condition, Sani Pass still remains one of the region’s most arduous and…
Is cultural immersion important to you when you travel? With tales of a python god and crocodile-infested waters that are safe to swim in, Venda’s Lake Fundudzi is a fascinating place to visit and a prime example of South Africa’s cultural wealth and beauty, and just one of the gems we discovered on our Ultimate South…
In our experience, KwaZulu-Natal has a few absolute gems – places that very few people know about and even fewer have managed to explore. The Ongoye Forest Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal is an unspoiled patch of rare scarp forest, set on a ridge high above the coastline to the east. It is a rare and diverse habitat…
Mnyameni Falls near Xolobeni on the northern Wild Coast is one of those magical waterfalls that we love. For starters, it is always a treat to explore a new section of our amazing country and in South Africa, that’s not hard to do. Set in the Amadiba section of the Wild Coast, Mnyameni Falls is…
The Northern Cape has always been one of those places that has held a certain romance for me. I love the idea of a wide open land, wild and largely untouched, the horizon blurred by midday summer heat mirages followed by the extreme of negative temperatures during the winter months. This is a land you…
From the time that we started planning our Ultimate South African Road Trip, Bevan and I were looking forward to exploring our country’s west coast from Cape Town up to the Namibian border. Perhaps it is because we have grown up in KwaZulu-Natal that the west coast has this allure for us – it is…
Barberton in the Kruger Lowveld region of Mpumalanga isn’t a place that we were too familiar with before this trip. The only time we had ever heard about it before was on the daily weather forecast. Apart from its tendency to be partly cloudy with the occasional afternoon thundershower, we really didn’t know what to…
Ithala Game Reserve totally blew us away! Ithala Game Reserve just outside Louwsburg in northern KwaZulu-Natal is a relatively new reserve. Established in 1973, the land previously had a number of uses including gold mining. Evidence of varied and poor land use management is visible in some areas of the park in the form of…
At the end of our Kosi Bay stop, Bevan and I found ourselves tantalizingly close to Mozambique. Stray along the border Kosi Bay is in fact only a few kilometres from the Farazela Border Post between South Africa and Mozambique, and the dunes at the Kosi Bay mouth are clearly visible from the border town…
Bevan and I have just been fortunate enough to have spent some time in the Coastal Forest section of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. This area of the park includes the stretch of northern KwaZulu-Natal coastline between Sodwana Bay and Kosi Bay near the Mozambique border. This is a remote section of coastline, accessible for the most part…
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