South Africa is the easiest Africa argument to make to a first-time traveller. Cape Town is one of the world’s great cities — Table Mountain, a coastline on two oceans, wine country forty-five minutes away, and restaurants that compete with anywhere in Europe. The Sabi Sands private game reserve is the best Big Five safari territory on the continent, with game drives that produce encounters at close range because the animals here have grown up around vehicles and are entirely unperturbed. Combining them takes nine nights and produces a trip that most clients describe as the most complete holiday they’ve taken.
Cape Town rewards being understood as a city rather than a backdrop. Table Mountain by cable car is the morning the trip is built around; the Cape Peninsula drive down to Cape Point, with the boulders at Simon’s Town where African penguins conduct their affairs, takes a full day and earns it. The V&A Waterfront is functional rather than atmospheric, and most serious eating happens in De Waterkant and the city bowl. The Winelands — Stellenbosch and Franschhoek — are day trips, or two-night extensions if the trip has room. The Cape Winelands grow Chenin Blanc and Pinotage in the shadow of the same mountains that the Dutch settlers named four hundred years ago, and a morning in Franschhoek eating at The Tasting Room is one of the great restaurant meals in Africa.
The Sabi Sands is a different proposition from the Maasai Mara or the Serengeti. The bush is thicker, the game drives more intimate, the encounters closer — no rules about distance because there are no rules, and the guide and tracker can drive off-road to follow a leopard. Singita is the benchmark; Londolozi is the institution (the Mann family have been in the Sabi Sands for forty years and the legacy is felt in the camp culture); &Beyond Kirkman’s and Lion Sands are excellent alternatives. Four nights at any of these lodges produces more wildlife time than most first-time visitors believe possible.
