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South Africa

Capital : Pretoria
Language : Afrikaans, English,Zulu and others
Currency : rand
Area : 1,223,201 sq km
Population : 42,741,000
Form of Government : Federal Republic

South Africa,republic in southern Africa, bordered on the north by Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Swaziland; on the east and south by the Indian Ocean; and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Lesotho forms an enclave in the eastern part of the country.Pretoria is the country's administrative capital, and Cape Town is its largest city.

For decades, South Africa was a pariah nation, isolated from the world by its choice of government. Today, South Africa has officially cast off the system of apartheid and is now rapidly emerging as the first country of Africa. The most European country in Africa now markets itself as a unique blend of different cultures. This is where you will find wide beaches, stunning mountain vistas, wine estates, the ‘big five’ on safaris, the sinful splendour of Sun City and three UNESCO World Heritage sites.


Major Attractions :
Cape Town: Cape Town is the epicentre of the Western Cape region of South Africa, and it is easy to forget that the city is surrounded by wild beaches, rugged mountain chains and bucolic wine farms. Home to nomadic Khoi-San hunter-gatherers for at least 30 000 years, the Cape Peninsula was first settled by Dutch sailors, led by Jan van Riebeeck, on April 6, 1652, although Portuguese sailors led by Bartholomeu Diaz first made landfall here in 1496. Strolling through the city centre, every corner hides another facet of this fascinating city. Seasoned travellers will find themselves confused, as a little bit of Paris merges into New York, London, Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa. Boutiques selling the latest in European designer clothes snuggle side by side brash American brand-name stores, with obscure African art galleries hidden in between. There is a polyglot of languages spoken on the streets, traders sell food on corner stalls that reflect the cuisines of Africa, and in the street markets, the art is as much South African as Nigerian or Masai. This is one of the reasons why Cape Town stakes a claim as one of the most bewitching cities on the planet - it is an African city at heart, but manages to assimilate a huge diversity of cultural influences: African, European, Asian, and even a little bit of America as the ubiquitous McDonald's and Planet Hollywood signs begin to intrude into the fabric of one of Africa's oldest cities.

The world has not been slow in discovering Cape Town, even if Cape Town is sometimes a tad slow in discovering the world, with its often sloppy standards of service and casual attitude to the needs of tourists. The locals are notoriously laid-back, making Cape Town one of the most relaxed places on earth. Even the bankers sometimes go to work in jeans and t-shirts. In summer, it is hard to escape the glitz of international film crews shooting features, commercials and fashion shoots on every second street corner, lured by great foreign exchange rates, exotic locations, a world-class infrastructure and a seemingly endless supply of drop dead beautiful extras, both male and female. Cape Town is, however, immediately surrounded by the ever-visible legacy of apartheid. The road into the city from the airport runs through a sprawling shanty town, a hangover from the days of the notorious Group Areas Act, which reserved the prime city land for whites, and condemned black and coloured, or mixed-race, people to the bleak, windswept Cape Flats. The suburbs are now rapidly integrating as economic barriers collapse, but the shanty towns are also growing by the day as rural job-seekers are drawn to the city in search of work.

Further afield, Cape Town blossoms again. To the east, lies the mysterious beauty of the Overberg and the rolling plains, deserted beaches and high mountains of the Southern Cape. To the north and northwest, the misty, harsh beauty of the West Coast, the wilderness areas of the Cedarberg and Ceres Karoo and the springtime explosion of hallucinogenic colours as Namaqualand bursts into flower. Less than an hour's drive from the city centre, some of the best New World wines are produced, many of them on small 'boutique' estates. These welcome visitors for tasting sessions and hedonistic picnics surrounded by the rich smell of grape musk, with the towering peaks of the Cape mountains overhead. It is not just the summer months (October to April) that make the Cape so attractive: Winter (June to September) is the Cape's best kept secret, the locals even call it 'the secret season'. There are weeks between the rain and freezing winds that are hot and clear, the tourist crowds are gone, and the whales and dolphins come home to play in the myriad of small bays that dot the rugged coastline of the Cape Peninsula.

Johannesburg: There's a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi. There's a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe. There's a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique - from Lesotho from Botswana from Swaziland.' These lines are from Hugh Masekela's quintessential anthem, called Stimela (steam engine), which profoundly captures the essence of the millions of migrant labourers who, since 4 October 1886, when the first claims were laid out, have mined the gold that built the economy of Johannesburg and South Africa. The city today has progressed far beyond the status of mere gold rush settlement, becoming a vibrant, violent and unpredictable place, where fortunes as well as lives can be lost and found like a small child's toys. In Zulu, Johannesburg is called E'goli ('place of gold') - an epithet no longer quite fitting as the last of Johannesburg's mines ran out of gold-bearing ore decades ago, while the towering yellow mine dumps, once the city's prime icons that dominated old postcards, have largely been recycled. New commercial, retail and industrial districts have risen to replace these 40-million-ton yellow-white mounds. In ancient cities, one may be able to find a sense of permanence within the walls of a formidable fortress, but Johannesburg is a city in flux, a place where change is the only enduring feature.

Sub-Saharan Africa's greatest and - at over 2500 sq kilometres (900 sq miles) - the world's largest inland city, Johannesburg straddles rows of jagged quartzite ridges beneath which a century of gold mining has produced a veritable honeycomb of tunnels. Technology may have claimed the mine-sands but millions of trees have risen from the sprawling suburbs; on satellite images much of Johannesburg resembles a rainforest - an unexpected backdrop to a formidable array of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, and concrete, chrome and glass skyscrapers. Makeshift shacks of scrap reflected in the glossy glass façade of the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange building on Diagonal Street, bear testimony to the chasm between the fantastically wealthy and the desperately poor that still divides this city. Situated 550km (344 miles) from the nearest port on a vast inland plateau, 1700m (5700ft) high, Johannesburg's climate is much milder and drier than its latitude would suggest and is also free of malaria, which plagues much of the rest of Africa. Crime may have become synonymous with Johannesburg in the minds of many people but the green and yellow uniforms of the Central Improvement District (CID) security guards are a new, comforting feature on almost every street corner in targeted areas.

Josi, Jo'burg or Joeys to the locals, this is a city undergoing dramatic changes. Black people, formerly excluded from living (legally) outside of townships, such as Soweto, are moving into the downtown and inner-city areas, while formerly privileged (white) citizens are migrating outwards due to increasing crime, squalor and perhaps some reluctance to live side by side with the newly enfranchised majority. Paradoxically almost all of the old Apartheid-era street names, such as Barry Hertzog Avenue and Hendrick Verwoerd Drive, named after the architects of this 'crime against humanity', still survive. However, plans are afoot to change this so visitors should be warned that some of the street addresses in this guide could soon be obsolete.