I Visited South Africa 10+ Times Last Year—Here Are the Best Hotels, Restaurants, and Safari Experiences I Recommend to Anyone

On a cloudless day last April, Cape Town looked from above like a massive sandstone amphitheater. A colossal, flat-topped mountain tumbled steeply down toward the beaches to form a bowl in which the city lay. It was autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, but from a helicopter, the sea looked almost Hawaiian—turquoise and deep sapphire, roiling with sharks and humpback whales. The pearly beachfront hotels, too, might have been on the coast of Maui, but for the swooping, elliptical football stadium nearby, an icon of the city since it was built for the 2010 World Cup.

Seen from even farther afield—in the pages of history books, say—Cape Town can seem a veritable Ultima Thule, a bountiful Eden at the southernmost tip of South Africa, where traders on the spice route stopped to revictualize their ships halfway between Europe and Asia. The city sits on a crescent-shaped cove, with the Cape of Good Hope extending toward the antipodal south—which makes for the disorienting experience of being at the southern tip of Africa and, if you are facing the marina, watching the sun set to your left. 

Perceptions in South Africa, and perceptions of South Africa, became a kind of focus on the multiple visits I made to the country during an extended trip around the continent in the spring of last year. Three decades after its first democratic elections, the country was preparing for what felt like a new paradigm shift, a national election that brought with it a cautious optimism. Everyone I spoke with, from retirees to young people born post-apartheid, was warily preparing to move on from the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, and hoping for more progress and accountability from their government. (As of this writing, the new coalition, the first in the country’s history, looks to be business-friendly, encouraging foreign investment—though questions remain about how it will use its mandate to address high unemployment and economic disparity.)

Of course, it takes a good deal of optimism to move a country past the status quo, and a confidence that the future can be better than the present, unconfined by the past. In Cape Town, in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, the artifacts and legacies of hundreds of years of oppression, colonialism, and apartheid are still on display. But everywhere I went in South Africa there was also a bloom of pride, in the country’s culture, its cuisine and hospitality, its landscape and beaches and natural wonders—and in its positioning on the global stage. 

Cultural narrative and perspective are important, but neither one is permanent. One day I sat in an elegant suite at the newly renovated Cape Grace, a grand red-brick French classical building now managed by Fairmont Hotels, looking out over the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront marina and watching seals sunbathe on the docks below. I fantasized about what would happen if, say, a hit Netflix show were set there—maybe a Miami Vice–style series filmed along the harbor and the string of miraculous beaches around Cape Town. What would it do to South Africa’s tourism industry if the world were to see the country in all its glamour and wonder, its romance and riches? 

If the Cape Town projected by travel magazines is a Mentos-colored city by the sea, the powdery-pink Mount Nelson, a Belmond Hotel, was the perfect place from which to experience it. Behind a gate of white classical pillars and down an avenue lined with palm trees, the Mount Nelson is a grand Victorian wedding cake of a building, with pewter-colored shutters and wrought-iron balconies giving out onto green lawns. At breakfast overlooking the pool, or at the beloved high tea, women who looked a bit like Vanessa Redgrave planned or recounted their adventures around town. In the evening, aperitifs arrived with various types of biltong while the shoulders of Table Mountain behind the hotel cottages faded into a dusty mauve. 

Wandering out of the hotel toward the harbor, past the thorny acacias that border the sidewalk, I found shops and restaurants that wouldn’t be out of place in Miami or Melbourne, with generically hip names (Gipsy Rabbit, Black Betty). Not that anyone would ever confuse Cape Town for anywhere else. In front of the red-and-white-brick Victorian Athletic Club restaurant I saw a souped-up old Land Cruiser, dusty from a drive through the bush, idling beside a gold Lamborghini. Every noontime, a cannon shot rings out from Signal Hill, above the Crayola-colored buildings of Bo-Kaap, the neighborhood settled by slaves, exiles, and refugees from Malaysia and Indonesia that is home to the oldest mosque in the country. In this, the Mother City—so called because it was the first South African settlement of the Dutch East India Trading Company—the maritime and colonial history is evident everywhere. 

As I drove east from the city, toward the wine country of Stellenbosch—in part on a highway called Settlers Way—a long parade of pine trees was soon joined by dense thickets of eucalyptus. Olive trees gathered in groves, and distant, Lost World–looking mountains came into focus. I was impressed by their gentle, human scale. From the road, they looked shocking, shooting straight up like something out of science fiction, but they also gave me an incredible sense of comfort, of grounding and orientation. I drove up a steep sandstone escarpment, along which the spiny, mollusk-like protea flower was blooming in lavender and yellow. Then, suddenly, I was surrounded by vineyards.

The main street of Stellenbosch is a bit like Napa Valley—if Napa Valley were set in the same world as The Lord of the Rings—and lined with quaint, cottage-like structures selling luxury goods. The churches of Stellenbosch are blinding-white affairs in the colonial Cape Dutch style. So too are the buildings at Babylonstoren. The brainchild of businessman Koos Bekker and former magazine editor Karen Roos—who also created the Newt resort in Somerset, England—Babylonstoren is a wildly beloved hotel, farm stand, and winery in the Franschhoek wine valley. (It’s named after a hill on the property that was thought to look like the tower of Babel.)

I’m not sure where my obsession with biltong—or, indeed, with Cape wines—started, but it certainly reached its apogee at Babylonstoren. The resort’s three restaurants are rightly proud of their beef, which is sourced from its small herd of Chianina cattle—a giant, muscular Italian breed that looked like bodybuilders compared with the other cows on the farm. There is even, two nights a week, a communal feast called Carnivore, aimed at showcasing the zillions of ways the beef might best be brought to table, from zingy tartare and unctuous tagliata to the best biltong I’ve ever eaten. And if there is never such a thing as too much meat on the menu here, I did learn a new tactic for managing my way through a magnificent parade of local wines: zebra-striping, which means alternating a glass of wine with a glass of water. 

We may be approaching the worldwide peak of farm-stand branding and aesthetics, but no one does it better than Babylonstoren. I was given a tour of a recently opened project in an adjacent valley, for which they reconstructed an entire Cape Dutch 19th-century village around a house museum, where kids can watch costumed woodworkers and leatherworkers while their parents partake of the preindustrial-style distillery and purchase handcrafted leather goods at the gift shop. 

Farther into the valley, tucked into a cul-de-sac created by the Groot Drakenstein and Franschhoek mountains, the town of Franschhoek, once famous for the elephants that roamed there, is now better known for its bountiful produce. Beyond the sycamore trees that, during my autumn visit, were starting to turn gold and copper, the Sterrekopje Healing Farm resort felt like something out of a fairy tale. When I arrived, in late afternoon, I was overwhelmed by just how fantastical everything looked—a little bit old master painting, a little bit Narnia. 

The garden, which has been revived by Nicole Boekhoorn and Fleur Huijskens, the Dutch couple who bought the property in 2019, was relatively restrained—appropriately for the season—while at the same time being the picture of abundance. A brilliant white stallion being put through its paces in a corral might have been something out of a medieval tapestry. Egyptian geese carved glittering arrows into the black waters of the various lakes on the property. The staff, in their apricot-colored linens, made their way through the gardens to the tiled open kitchen and sitting room, escorting me to magnificent feasts, or to a spa area hung with dried herbs for a hammam session or an alignment. Throughout my stay, whether eating or hiking or simply lying, blissed-out, by the pool, I felt a bit euphoric—a very good kind of euphoria, one I couldn’t wait to tell others about. 

And maybe I need to, because so many of my American friends have never been to South Africa—and have no plans to go anytime soon. We talk all the time about how the world is shrinking. But everyone I know who regularly travels to Asia, India, or the Mideast still thinks of Cape Town as the far side of the moon.

Granted, South Africa is a very long trip for Americans, and expensive in both dollars and time. The country has not been terribly well serviced by American carriers. (I took the one nonstop from New York to Cape Town, on United.) Perhaps for this reason—and because of the bounty on offer in South Africa—most of the Americans I met there were, like me, trying to combine a variety of experiences in multiple locations. Whether they were on honeymoon or a holiday, most first-time travelers were on a similar itinerary: Cape Town for the beaches, hiking, and food; wine country for the obvious; and then, safari.

South Africa is, after all, the place that lives in the imagination as the land of the Big Five. Elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard, and rhinoceros were the most treasured trophies because they were the most dangerous to approach on foot. Out toward the eastern edge of this massive country, near Kruger National Park (one of the first areas in the country to be set aside for the protection of big game), I visited one of the high holies of safari. Constructed along the Sand River, on a private game reserve, Singita Sabi Sand is a collection of properties that includes Ebony Lodge, which was Singita’s first property, and Boulders Lodge. I checked in to Ebony Lodge, which was celebrating its 30th anniversary with the unveiling of a brand-new renovation. 

In the local Shangaan-Tsonga language, “singita” translates as “place of miracles.” To say the sightings at Sabi Sand were miraculous would be to undersell it—one morning we spotted each of the Big Five before 9 a.m.: a leopard in a tree, looking at a pair of lions; a rhino running alongside our vehicle, five feet away; elephants galore; and more buffalo than I could count. But what I continue to think about, many months after returning home, are the interactions I had with the staff at Ebony Lodge, from my guide, Coman Mnisi, whose father was among the last residents be relocated out of the area, to the waiter and sommeliers who seemed to be assigned to me personally. 

My fellow guests too, with whom I bonded in that intense, brief way I’ve only ever experienced on safari, were ideal company. One couple, honeymooners from Guadalajara, Mexico, described the lodge as a luxurious Tarzan tree house—which seemed spot-on as we sat on the terrace and watched a family of elephants cross the Sand River below.

My expectations before visiting South Africa were sky-high, and still I was blown away by the rich, vibrant reality. Even now, I can’t quite believe that I ate food that good, saw views that remarkable, had sensations and conversations and experiences so affecting. South Africa toppled me, with awe, with inspiration. And isn’t that how we would describe witnessing a miracle?  

A version of this story first appeared in the March 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Southern Star.”