Our South African Odyssey

Traveling Through South Africa’s Landscapes

Over the period of couple of weeks we recently toured in South Africa and covered a great deal of territory, mostly in buses. This gave us the opportunity to see a lot of this incredible country up close. At every turn the landscapes simply took our breath away.

The central and northwestern regions of South Africa are generally flat land mixed with gently rolling landscapes filled with large stretches of farms, managed forests and coal mines.

Kroger National Park

Kruger National Park is generally similar geography but kept mostly undeveloped, with some mountainous areas along the eastern boundary. Kruger with its connected parks have resulted in a vast amount of land remaining in a wild natural state.

Traveling south from Kroger you soon get to the Grand Canyon of South Africa. The Blyde River Canyon, also known as Motlatse Canyon, is the third-largest canyon in the world, stretching for 26 miles and reaching depths of 2,600 feet. Miles and miles of incredible landscapes.

The Blyde River Canyon

Traveling south toward Cape Town are a number of long valleys oriented north-south providing South Africa with a perfect environment for growing grapes and yielding a number of excellent vineyards.

Table Mountain

Hout Bay Coastal Cape Town

Cape Town itself sits on the Atlantic with a number of coastal bays backed up by steep mountain ranges. This, in addition to providing amazing landscapes, shelters the city and its suburbs from cold weather fronts out of the southeast.

The Cape Peninsula

South out of Cape Town is the Cape Peninsula ending at the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which results in a unique marine environment. A cold Arctic current flows northward along the Atlantic coast, while the warmer currents from the Indian Ocean flow southward along the eastern Indian Ocean coast. These currents are responsible for the peninsula’s extreme climate changes.

The Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the southern tip of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. It is the southern most point of land on the African Continent with a lot of the surrounding land preserved in National Parks..