It was an awkward coincidence that I left for South Africa two weeks after getting married. Our wedding date was settled several weeks after I’d confirmed the press trip sponsored by South African Airways.
Thanks to my hosts, I would fly business class, coddled with champagne and hot towels on a 16-hour flight from Vancouver to Johannesburg. My new wife termed it my “solo honeymoon.”
In truth, I wasn’t going alone. I was teamed with nine other journalists from North America from various trade and consumer publications as we trekked by plane, bus, van, ATV, electric bike, and even helicopter.
Notepads were almost as omnipresent as the smartphones we used to tweet pictures of our hotel rooms and sunrises.
What we discovered was a country that confounded our expectations as the post-Apartheid home of beaches and safaris — though there is plenty of that. In our first stop, Durban, we discovered the sizeable ethnic Indian population, which at one point included among its ranks, Mohandas Gandhi, who practised law in the country from 1893 to 1914.
Durban’s signature dish, Bunny Chow, is a curry served in a hollowed out quarter-loaf of white bread. The name reputedly derives from the word “bania,” the merchant caste of the Indian family who created the dish. At the city’s spice market, one can acquire the spicy local rendition of curry, the colourfully named “mother-in-law’s tongue,” as well as figurines of safari animals and Nelson Mandela T-shirts.
While only tourists wear Mandela paraphernalia, South Africans speak freely about their experiences during Apartheid, from the Afrikaner tour guide who talked about the overnight de-segregation of his high school to the black driver who matter-of-factly related his past imprisonment for sedition.
They speak not with bitterness, but with a kind of relief that comes from the two decades of relative stability that followed after Mandela was elected president in the country’s first free election in 1994.
South Africa is populated with memorials and museums that allow visitors to examine its past with schoolchildren who know only one kind of country. The most striking was a visit to the site where Mandela was arrested in 1962. (Convicted in 1963, he would serve 27 years in prison.) Located in Howick, about 90 minutes from Durban, what’s known as the Mandela Capture Site has a museum stuffed with blown-up photographs, video and text.
But what captivates visitors comes after walking a long path — symbolizing Mandela’s winding road to liberation from prison and his country’s history of oppression — toward a site designed by artist Marco Cianfanelli and architect Jeremy Rose.
More than 50 iron rods between 6.5 and 9.5-metres tall are arranged, three dimensionally, to form a profile image of Mandela when viewed, head on, from 35 metres away.
These reflective moments from history are counter-balanced with colonial glamour as we arrive in Cape Town. Nestled between Table Bay and the flat-topped Table Mountain, Cape Town is the country’s second-largest and most picturesque city.
Founded in 1652, the city boasts the national legislative buildings, the provincial park and a lush city park. We stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel, a sprawling candy floss-pink property. Built in 1899, the
“Nelly” maintains its throwback swank but also sports modern touches such as the Nespresso coffee machine and two flat-screen TVs in my room. My solo honeymoon feels too real then and there.
We board a nine-seat plane to our final stop, the Madikwe Game Reserve, located on the southern edge of the Kalahari Desert. Created from reclaimed cattle grazing land in 1993, Madikwe is a fledgling vacation spot that’s home to the “Big Five” safari animals (lions, leopards, elephants, water buffalo and rhinoceroses) and free of malaria.
Our guides at the Madikwe Safari Lodge, where we stay in thatched-roof cottages with plunge pools and outdoor showers, drive us along red dirt roads between low-slung hills and past scrubby, arid landscape in search of wildlife. We come within throwing distance of cheetahs, rhinos and wild dogs.
On our afternoon rides, after high tea in the lodge’s al fresco sitting area, we drive past sunset. We swaddle ourselves in blankets and hot water bottles in the open-air jeep as our guide points out moonlit pachyderms and giraffes while using a detached headlight.
Back at the lodge for dinner, we sample the sommelier’s pairings to our three-course dinner. On our last night, our group toasts each other while we attempt to upload photos on the shaky Wi-fi. Many of us have relationships that we need to attend to, back home.
I depart early from dinner to my room to find that the maid had created a bubble bath with candles and rose petals. It would’ve capped a perfect night for a honeymooning couple. As it is, I step into the tub sheepishly, glad to be starting the long journey back to married life the next day.
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