Visitors to Africa · 2027

FourChapters

Southern Africa, privately hosted.

Four journeys through one year, each built around a season and a reason to be there.

February for the Cape at its best, with the harvest in and the sea warm enough to swim. March for families, and for children who think Africa is a picture in a book. April for Lesotho and the high country, where almost no operator goes. September for the whales, and for a stretch of coast where the human story is a hundred thousand years old.

Every one is hosted personally by me, and written out day by day before anything is sold.

Around each of these journeys sits everything you would expect of a great trip to this part of the world. What follows is the part that makes each one unrepeatable.

Four or five of these moments is the right number for any single journey. More than that and they begin to crowd each other out. Each is arranged privately, confirmed in writing before a word is printed, and carries an alternative held in reserve for the day the weather has other plans.

February

The Cape, privately

A private house above the Atlantic, the harvest at its height, and a desert two hours inland where the sky is darker than almost anywhere on earth.

Ten days
Up to twelve guests
Cape Town · Winelands · Karoo

The summit at sundown

Up Table Mountain ahead of every queue, a long walk along the top towards Devil's Peak, and a table set privately in the right place as the sun goes into the Atlantic.

Swimming with penguins

Not the boardwalks. A quiet beach that visitors never find, where guests swim in clear water while the birds come and go around them.

A wine of their own

An early morning in the vineyard with the winemaker and the press running, then a blending session where the group makes its own wine, bottled under their own label and sent on to them.

Lunch on the Simonsberg

A helicopter from the valley floor to a table high on the mountain above one of the great estates, with Stellenbosch below and the wines poured where the grapes were grown.

The oldest sweet wine in the world

A vertical tasting of Vin de Constance reaching back into the nineteenth century — the wine Napoleon asked for on Saint Helena.

A sky almost no one sees

An astronomer brought out to the reserve for the evening with his own telescopes. No town, no road and no farm light within sight — the same clear Karoo air that persuaded astronomers to build the southern hemisphere’s largest telescope a little further north, and nobody else standing under it.

This journey is built in full, day by day, at three levels — and I am glad to share it.

March

For the families

The same country at a gentler pace, built entirely around what children remember rather than what adults photograph.

Eight days
Up to fourteen guests
Malaria-free throughout

A day on a working farm

One of the largest in the country, and not a place that takes visitors. Cows milked at first light, eggs still warm, a chick breaking out of its shell. Five calves are born here every day.

Sending a penguin home

A morning behind the scenes at the seabird hospital outside Cape Town, helping to feed the birds — and, if a release falls in the right week, watching one walk down the sand and swim away.

Their own place on the vehicle

A private reserve where families have a lodge of their own, and where the children learn to read tracks rather than be driven past them.

The mountain braai

Quad bikes high into the hills and a fire under the open sky, with a view no brochure has ever printed.

A book of their own

Some weeks after they fly home, a parcel arrives: a printed book of their journey, written by me, illustrated with their own photographs, with their names in it.

This chapter is built in full, day by day — and I am glad to share it.

April

Lesotho and the high country

A malaria-free safari in the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, then up the Drakensberg the dramatic way into a mountain kingdom almost no one offers.

Twelve days
Up to ten guests
Nambiti · Drakensberg · Lesotho

Over the Sani Pass

Up into the kingdom by 4x4 on the most dramatic road in Southern Africa, and a night at the top, on the roof of Africa.

A table on an unnamed summit

A peak no road reaches and no path climbs. White linen, chilled champagne and a lunch carried up before the guests arrive. So far as anyone knows, no one has eaten there — and no one will again, because each journey is given its own mountain.

The falls from the air

A flight over one of the highest single-drop waterfalls in Africa, into country most travellers will never see photographed.

A welcome that was arranged, not bought

Time with Basotho families in the highlands, through relationships built over four years of working in the country.

This chapter is built in full, day by day — see the twelve days, at three levels, here.

September

The whales, and deep time

The coast I was born on, at the one month of the year when the whales come in to calve and the semi-desert turns to flowers.

Nine days
Up to twelve guests
Walker Bay · the West Coast

Hearing them, not only seeing them

Small boats held for the group alone, engines cut, and a hydrophone over the side — so the guests hear the low calls of a mother and her calf somewhere beneath the hull.

The museum after dark

A private evening with the fossilised footprints of a woman who walked this coast some 117,000 years ago, with a curator beside them and the doors closed to everyone else.

Her shore, by boat

Across the lagoon in the early light, long before the gates open and long before any vehicle can reach the bay, to the rock where those footprints were found. I was born on this coast, and there is a photograph of me as a boy on that same rock.

A table from the same shoreline

A restaurant of a couple of dozen seats, once named the finest in the world, taken entirely for a long lunch — with a forage along the beach before it.

The flowers, for a few weeks only

In the right week of September, the hills above the lagoon turn white, purple and orange down to the sea.

This chapter is built in full, day by day — see the nine days, at three levels, here.

Southern right whales, a mother and calf

Hosted in person

I travel every journey from the moment the guests land until the moment they leave, with a guide qualified in South Africa alongside me throughout.

Visitors to Africa