04 May 2024

South Africa

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Up close and personal

From scoprions to hungry cheetahs, Andrew Morrod goes eyeball to eyeball on a fabulous South African safari.

South Africa - On safari with the cheetahs

1 On safari with the cheetahs 2 Lioness at sunset 3 Franschhoek Valley

WE WERE BOUNCING ALONG at 30 kilometres an hour through the velvet darkness of the African bush when our tracker, Renius, shot out his arm to signal a sighting. Alex, the ranger, braked hard and backed up.

Renius’s flashlight played on the trunk of a marula tree and there, emerging from a hole, was a scorpion.

Quite how Renius saw the two tiny legs appearing as we shot past I will never know. But after two days exploring the Sabi Sands game reserve guided by his sharp eyes, I was hardly surprised.

Unlike the neighbouring Kruger Park, where visitors generally cannot stray from the tarmac roads, the private reserves in Sabi Sands - in this northeast corner of South Africa - allow you to roam over 500km of dusty tracks by Land Rover.

We came within a few feet of a pair of mating leopards as dusk closed in one afternoon and on the second day Renius sighted a male cheetah which we tracked for nearly an hour, driving slowly abreast of his progress about 60ft away.

For the fastest land animal, he had a remarkably languid approach to securing breakfast, strolling from one termite mound to another as he scrutinised the horizon for young impala. But the cheetah’s ease of movement disguised his awesome power.

He climbed into a thorn tree from where he observed us as we pulled to a halt close by. Then he gave a huge stretch and suddenly bolted down the trunk and with a flick of his heavy tail swung straight at us.

Seated with my legs hanging out of the back of the truck, I froze with fear as the great, sleek beast, muscles rippling, cantered 10ft away.

With my girlfriend Catherine I stayed at two lodges in the reserve, Londolozi and Singita, both known for their elegance. The moment you swoop down in the tiny plane on to the bush airstrip, a hippo feeding ground after dark, there is an acute sense of being in the wild. Yet the lodges are havens of old-fashioned White Mischief-style decadence.

Dining under brilliant stars

Our tree house apartment was raised above the surrounding bush, complete with plunge pool. We breakfasted on a vast wooden platform high over the Savannah. After dark, there was silver service dining under brilliant stars.

Both lodges are members of the Relais & Chateaux group, which has ten member hotels in South Africa. We used some of them to mark out a two-week itinerary.

After flying to Port Elizabeth, we picked up a car and set out west one morning along the coastal Garden Route with the high sun on our backs.

The most stunning coastal road in South Africa is the Chapman’s Peak Drive south from Cape Town, which rivals anything California or Monaco has to offer. But the Garden Route has many attractions which make driving it rather like watching a game of tennis.

Your eye is constantly drawn between the crashing surf of the ocean to your left and the dense indigenous trees of the Knysna Forest to the right, stretching back to the brooding peaks of the Outeniqua range.

This angular horizon was our constant companion to the very end of the continent, at the Cape of Good Hope, where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean and the sunset seems to stretch halfway to South America.

After a couple of days at the amiable resort of Plettenberg Bay, we slipped away from the main road and climbed steeply onto the Seven Passes Road, 60 km of gravel between genteel Knysna and the town of George to the west.

Valleys dense with forest

The road snakes through towering valleys dense with forest, through Phantom Pass, finally bursting out onto a high plateau.

Here, far from the brooding and shambolic townships outside every major town, the local children waved and smiled as they trotted home from school barefoot.

We stayed that night at The Marine, an elegant hotel in Harmanus Bay.

In the morning, I drew back the curtains and was greeted by the sight of a vast Southern Right whale breaching high out of the calm waters of the bay and collapsing back in a tower of spray.

Then we drove west along the precipitous coast road towards Cape Town.

Venturing inland to the winelands to see something different paid off.

Here, we found the Franschhoek Valley where the Huguenots three centuries ago recognised a God-given natural phenomenon and turned it into a man-made paradise.

The road from the quiet university town of Stellenbosch runs up the centre of the valley floor and on either side are the vineyards - many of which you can visit to taste their wine and see how it is produced.

Leaving the outlandish scenery of the region behind we drove back to Cape Town and the sumptuous Cellars hotel on the back slopes of Table Mountain.

Luxury is all very well, but if you want to know what the country is all about, take a boat to Robben Island.

It’s a barren, windswept place, sited far out in Table Bay like a second Alcatraz.

The audio testimonies of former prisoners, playing in the cells they used to inhabit, are a devastating record of the legacy of apartheid, of the suffering - and the small victories - of the political prisoners who lived in the shadow of those walls for half a lifetime.

It still calls for a great leap of imagination to think that the island’s most famous prisoner would one day take up residence in the finest house in the glittering city across the water.

I wondered as I strolled cell to cell whether Nelson Mandela himself ever foresaw what life had in store for him.

Perhaps even the eagle-eyed Renius wouldn’t have seen that coming.

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