South Africa Sightseeing

Victoria and Alfred Waterfront
Cape Town's main hub, the V&A Waterfront (www.waterfront.co.za), a beautifully restored old Victorian harbour, offers free entertainment and a wide variety of shops, plus museums (including an excellent aquarium), taverns and restaurants.

Government Avenue, Cape Town
Lined with fine old buildings, Government Avenue harbours relics of colonial government, including the South African Museum, Planetarium and National Gallery, the Houses of Parliament, Bertram House, the Groote Kerk (Dutch Reformed church) and Company's Gardens, a park founded in the 17th century.

Boulders Beach's penguin colony
The largest colony of African penguins to live on the mainland make their home in burrows on a protected part of Boulders Beach in Simonstown, near Cape Town. Visitors can watch them from a boardwalk.

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden
This extraordinarily beautiful landscaped garden, created by Cecil Rhodes in 1895 on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, is dedicated to indigenous plants and flowers, particularly those unique to the Cape (www.sanbi.org).

Addo Elephant National Park
Elephant herds are easy to spot in this park (www.addoelephant.com), which is also home to black rhino, buffalo and antelopes. Nearby is the upmarket Shamwari Game Reserve (www.shamwari.com), an award-winning conservation project, which has elephants, lions, leopards, rhino and buffalo.

iSimangaliso (formerly Greater St Lucia) Wetland Park
This wilderness park (www.isimangaliso.com), a UNESCO World Heritage site, is the only place in the world where hippos, crocodiles and sharks share the same lagoon. It also has giant dunes, beaches and tropical reefs, with superb birdwatching and diving.

Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve
With rocky hillsides, open savannah and thick woodland, this huge protected area supports numerous mammals, including the ‘Big Five', and well over 300 bird species. There are more rhinos here than anywhere else on earth.

Kruger National Park
World-famous for its wildlife, the Kruger Park (www.sanparks.org) is one of Africa's most popular places to track down the ‘Big Five'. Surrounding the massive park are private concessions that are less crowded, with exclusive safari camps and lodges catering for luxury travellers.

Pilanesberg Game Reserve
The third-largest game park in South Africa, this is an excellent ‘Big Five' destination (www.pilanesberggamereserve.com). Ringed by ancient hills and scattered with prehistoric remains, it's within easy reach of the over-the-top resort of Sun City.

Panorama Route, Mpumalanga
At the top of the spectacularly scenic Blyde River Canyon in the northern Drakensberg, just to the west of Kruger, there are waterfalls, dramatic mountains, plunging cliffs and fine views of the Lowveld, 1,000m (3,300ft) below (www.mpumalanga.com).

KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields
You can learn about the series of wars between the Zulus, Afrikaans and British (1830-1902) by exploring their bloody frontline in northern KwaZulu-Natal, an area of rolling grassland and rocky kopjies (hills), marked by graves, memorials and monuments (www.battlefields.kzn.org.za).

Kimberley
Here you'll find the Big Hole (www.thebighole.co.za), hand-dug by eager diamond prospectors in Kimberley's glory days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The nearby Visitors Centre includes a period reconstruction of the town and a well-stocked diamond vault.

Apartheid Museums, Johannesburg
Johannesburg's critically acclaimed Apartheid Museum (www.apartheidmuseum.org) tells the whole story of pre-1994 South Africa, Soweto's excellent Hector Pieterson Museum covers the 1976 student uprising and Constitutional Hill (www.constitutionhill.org.za) is on the site of a notorious jail where many activists were detained.

Robben Island
A short ferry trip from Cape Town takes you across Table Bay to Robben Island (www.robben-island.org.za), where Nelson Mandela and many other anti-apartheid activists were incarcerated. Visitors can ride around the island on an old prison bus and peek inside Mandela's cell.

Spring flowers in Namaqualand
The arid Namaqualand region (www.namaqualand.com) explodes with colour between mid-August and mid-September, when wild flowers burst into bloom, blanketing the landscape. The West Coast National Park is one of the best places to see the phenomenon.

See Contact Addresses for further tourist information.