South Africa

• The Cape Escape - Cape Town
• My Mountain High in Cape Town - Cape Town
• The Drop Zone - Cape Town
• On the trail to true adventure - Johannesburg
• The great es-Cape - Cape Town
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• My Zulu Extravaganza - Durban
• Up Close and Personal - South African Safari
• Tracking Big Game - Kruger National Park
• Sleeping with the Lions - South African Safari
• A Safari with real pride - South African Safari
• Where the Lion King comes to Life - South African Safari
• Our guide to the top 10 safaris - South African Safari
• A Roaring Success - Victoria Falls
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• The Worlds Most Beautiful Road? - The Garden Route
• Zipping off to Zanzibar - Zanzibar, Kenya
• Africa's catch of the day - Mozambique
• The Cape escape… and it was right up my Street - Garden Route: South Africa
• The nation kissed by a rainbow - South Africa
• Our wild silver wedding! - Kenya

A WORLD IN ONE COUNTRY is a tired old travel brochure cliche, but ‘a world in one road?’

This I had to test-drive. The brochure, Garden Route: Passage Through Paradise, didn’t stop there: ‘rugged mountains and hanging forests’, it gasped, ‘semi desert and wide blue seas’.

Whale-watching, lions, beaches, caves – frankly, it’s a wonder anyone comes home.

Traditionally, the route starts in Mossel Bay to the east of Cape Town, and takes you along the coast in an easterly direction past Plettenberg Bay to Port Elizabeth. But these days, the route extends way beyond those points in both directions. My brochure suggested picking up the car in Cape Town, dropping it off 435 ‘world-in-one-road’ miles later in Port Elizabeth. Who was I to argue?.

Cape town to gansbaai...

This is the stretch that lured generations of settlers across a foreverness of uncertainty and danger, and it’s easy to see why: mile upon mile of picket-fenced fields and wattle-shrouded manor houses – it’s only the odd egret overhead that reminds you you’re in Africa, not Kentucky.

Ninety glorious minutes from Table Mountain and 25 miles off the N2 from Vredenal, Grootbos nature reserve has 23 cottages dotted about the clifftops of what is, at 2,500 acres, the largest private estate devoted to fynbos, the Cape’s rich and unique vegetation. There is horse-riding and forest walks, 4WD day trips and boat trips in search of great white sharks and Cape fur seals, but come between July and December and you can sip sundowners on your balcony and watch southern right whales in Walker’s Bay..

...to mossel bay

Back on the N2, it’s two hours to Mossel Bay past a series of picture-postcard settler villages, of which Swellendam, after Cape Town and Stellenbosch the third oldest European settlement in the country, is your best bet for a blast of the nation’s pioneering past.

Twenty miles north of Mossel Bay, surrounded by Outeniqua forests at the foot of the Robison Pass, Eight Bells Mountain Inn is an almost indecently idyllic retreat, where pet dogs lounge at your feet while you breakfast in the sun, and hummingbirds hover by the pool. It’s a great base for walks, and also for trips over the mountains to Oudtshoorn, gateway to the arid desert of the little Karoo – it’s like driving from the orchards of Kent to the Kalahari in about 30 minutes.

...to knysna

Fifty miles from Mossel Bay, George is the largest town on the Garden Route. Elegant and handsome, it is a place of leafy avenues and oak-panelled 1840s churches, with one of the finest museums in the country. It is also the starting point for one of the most surprisingly enjoyable tourist traps in the world – the Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe, a 1920s steam train that chugs between the forests and lagoons of the Wilderness National Park the 42 miles to Knysna. Here or rather four miles south along Knysna lagoon, just past an exquisite miniature 19th century Norman-style church, lies Belvidere Manor and guest cottages – the single finest place to scoff al fresco oysters after a day on the nearby five-mile beach.

...to Plettenburg bay

Golf widows should look away now, because if there is one stretch of the Garden Route more beautiful than any other, it is the 13th, 14th, and 15th on Pezula golf course, a fynbos-carpeted clifftop championship links course overlooking the Indian Ocean.

If it has a rival, Robberg Penninsula, six miles south of Plettenberg, may well be it, with a cliff-clinging circuit trail offering staggering views of passing whales, seals, dolphins and seabirds, descending to a pristine crescent of sand and an irresistible mosaic of sparkling blue sea. Just outside the pretty beach resort of ‘Plett’, Hog Hollow Country Lodge has a forest sauna and 15 suites with private wooden decks overlooking the forest.

...to tsitsikamma national park

Beyond ‘Plett’, the N2 winds through ancient tracts of eucalyptus and pine trees past estuaries and beaches worth the airfare alone.

If boat trips up the Keurbooms River don’t send you scrambling for the nearest estate agent in search of house prices, then the beach at Nature’s Valley will. A 15-mile diversion along the R102 carries you over a stunning green and mauve fynbos plateau, then plunges past hanging vines and giant ferns into the Bloukrans gorge before rejoining the N2 close to Storms River Mouth. Here, just in from breaking waves and peeping oystercatchers, a rest camp with log cabins makes a great spot for stunning coastal walks along rockpool and sandy bay.

...to port elizabeth

Garden Routers often miss a trick here, heading straight to ‘PE’ airport and back to Cape Town. It’s a mistake. Even if the surf at Jeffrey’s Bay doesn’t tempt you, a short hop inland takes you to Shamwari Game Reserve or Addo National Park; Where Elephant House is a five-star safari treat.

Port Elizabeth itself is no Cape Town, but it is increasingly vibrant and has the Calabash Township tour that won last year’s Responsible Tourism Award.