South Africa

Unfenced along its western border with Kruger National Park, the Sabi Sand is home to some of the finest private safari lodges in Africa — Singita, Londolozi, MalaMala — and offers exceptional leopard sightings in habituated populations of extraordinary tameness. Night drives, bush walks, and unlimited off-road tracking here are unavailable in Kruger itself.

One of the world's most beautiful cities, Cape Town sits below a 1,086-metre flat-topped mountain that forms a dramatic backdrop to the harbour, the Waterfront, and the city bowl. The cable car summit provides one of the great urban views on earth, while the surrounding Cape Floristic Region is the world's smallest and most diverse floral kingdom.

Thirty kilometres from Cape Town, Stellenbosch and its neighbouring valleys of Franschhoek and Paarl produce some of the finest wines in the southern hemisphere in a landscape of Cape Dutch gabled farms, oak-lined streets, and mountains. Chenin Blanc, Pinotage, and world-class Cabernet Sauvignon are all produced here, and private cellar tastings with winemakers are easily arranged.

South Africa's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, iSimangaliso protects three interlocking ecosystems — marine, wetland, and forest — along 330 kilometres of KwaZulu-Natal coast. Hippos, leatherback and loggerhead turtles nesting on the beaches, whale sharks offshore, and Nile crocodiles in the lakes make this one of Africa's most diverse protected areas.

The Cape of Good Hope — the southwestern tip of the African continent — sits at the heart of a national park of extraordinary coastal scenery, with vertiginous sea cliffs, boulder beaches where African penguins breed, and the historic Cape Point lighthouse above the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The drive along Chapman's Peak is one of the world's great coastal roads.

One of Africa's largest national parks at 19,485 square kilometres, Kruger supports more species of large mammals than any other African game reserve — 147 species in total, including all of the Big Five. The park's private concessions on the western boundary, accessible only to lodge guests, allow off-road driving and walking safaris unavailable in the general park.