Visiting South Africa

[PyreneesPlot]

My Mum has announced that she wants to go to South Africa this autumn - she has always wanted to go, but it was way too far out of his comfort zone for my Dad. Now he's no longer with us she's stretching her wings!!. In return for doing all the organisation/research/booking Mr PP and I get to go too

The very, very vague idea is the usual kind of thing - Cape Town, Garden Route, Wine plus the Market Theatre and Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Maybe safari?

All the organised trips I've looked at so far are self-drive which doesn't strike me as being very organised!! We are VERY reluctant to self drive.

So anyone been? What did you do? And how?

BTW Mum is mid seventies, quite fit but really does not slum it.

[RedThorn]

Cape town to Wilderness ride the outeniqua choo choo champane horse ride on beach there, up to Knysna off to Outshooren visit the cheetah park, Cango caves.

From capetown catch the Booze busses through the wine farms... all you got to do is climb off drink wine, climb on, next wine farm , climb off rinse and repeat!

there's a helecopter ride to a game park, do a safari, chopper ride back... bliss

The western cape got some of the most diverse unique flora in any single localised area!

V&A waterfront awesome and the aquarium there is one of the best (knocks the socks off london's)

If you time it right , a ride to Hermanus and do a bit of whale watching and a little further in gans baai is white shark cage diving....


as you can tell, don't know the area very well

[Aberdeenplotter]

One of my customers and her husband over winter in Capetown. I keep hinting they should make space for me in their suitcase but it hasn't worked yet.

[Alison]

We went with Virgin a few years ago, it was semi organised in that they had standard package bits that you put together to make what you wanted. We flew out to Johannesburg then got a connection down to whatever the airport is near Kruger. Stayed there for a few days - some trips were included but we added to them so did a few safaris (including a brilliant walking one at sunrise which was a wonderful experience), a trip to a couple of animal sanctuaries and a trip round the gold rush towns which are frozen in time from when the rush finished. Then got an internal flight down to Cape Town and did a wine tour (somewhat drunken ) and a walk to freedom tour (including a guided trip round a township by a guy that lived there, an intro to the District 6 museum and trip to Robben Island). We also spent a day on the hop on hop off bus covering a load of other things we'd missed as well as a trip down to the Cape of Good Hope. Really loved the country and found Virgin to be very good for this one - as well as having great planes with 1001 films to watch on the trip, wasn't cheap though.

[PyreneesPlot]

Thanks - lots of googling to be done of all these ideas