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Chitwa Chitwa Lodge is in Sabi Sand, a private game reserve with the reputation for being not only the best managed, but one of the best places in the world for seeing leopards and lions. For the animals, the Sabi Sand and the other half dozen or so private game reserves abutting Kruger National Park are just another part of their territory where they’re protected, but not fenced.

Coconut palms line the pearly beach that curves around the Atlantic’s southern seaboard. Three of the Twelve Apostles’ forested peaks rise behind. Cape Town’s restored Victoria and Alfred Waterfront and downtown Longmarket Street are a ten-minute drive away. Beach holiday? Mountain retreat? Urban chic? The Bay Hotel on Camps Bay manages a bit of each.

The Tides knows its best feature and puts it to good use. It’s the sun setting behind a curve of palm-lined beach with the sky changing colors like a god’s kaleidoscope. The south Atlantic, sometimes a blue, calm and sometimes a gray, windswept fury, struts it stuff. We dined at The Tides on an early day in April as the first winter storms arrived. Seaside, The Tides is all glass, and inside two levels double its ringside seats to nature’s extravaganza. 

Whizzing out of modern Durban, a cultural curry of urban Zulus and whites spiced with Indians, we head for the Eastern Cape, the land of Mandela’s birth. Xhosa villages of scrawny goats and mud huts with conical grass roofs scatter across the dry, scrubby veld. It feels like another century. The ratty, jiving central town of Umtata feels like another country, one with no trace of South Africa’s gold and diamond wealth.