As befits a continent that takes up almost a quarter of the planet’s land surface, Africa exhibits great and fascinating diversities, a full palette of “incongruities and incredibilities” (to steal a phrase from Mark Twain).
That diversity is nowhere more dramatic than in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia–the three Southern Africa countries Micato takes such pleasure in helping our travellers get to know.
South Africa’s unofficial motto is A World in One Country (its official motto is Unity in Diversity) and the country’s diversity is nearly planetary in scope. Cape Town is one of Earth’s most dazzlingly situated cities. It’s also high-spirited, modern-minded, and chock full of hip bistros and elegant hotels, all of them presided over by stupendous Table Mountain. The nearby Cape Winelands, a kind of Napa Valley with added mountains and Old Dutch-style hostelries, is a magnet for fanciers of wine, fine cuisine, and beautiful countrysides. Kruger National Park and a series of equally wildlife-rich private game reserves–such as Micato favorites Sabi Sabi and Shambala, both complete with some of the continent’s loveliest and most salubrious camps and lodges–round out South Africa’s diversity with classic opportunities to safari in well-conserved gamelands.
Botswana, commonly considered a great African success story, is one of the world’s most sparsely inhabited nations, largely because so much of it consists of beautiful, but not terribly nurturing desert, notably the famously daunting Kalahari. The great, green exception to all that dry sand is one of Micato’s favourite earthly places, the famed Okavango Delta, where the robust river of the same name, frustrated in its search for an outlet to the sea, seeps life-givingly into the Kalahari’s sands, creating a huge wonderland of peaceful lagoons, meandering waterways, marvelously isolated luxury camps, and animals in profusion.
In Namibia we strike out from luxurious, magnificently designed safari camps into the vast and otherworldly deserts of the interior, marveling at the highest sand dunes on earth (the tallest could look the Empire State Building straight in the eye), making game drives in search of Namibia’s superbly adapted 192 mammal species (not to mention its 250 reptile and 645 bird species). Namibia has become a poster-country for intelligent, community-involved wildlife conservation; 50% of all its wild animals live freely in its many conservancies.
Luxury Africa Safaris to Southern Africa
African Splendour
The Best of East & Southern Africa
From fizzy Cape Town to East Africa’s legendary game parks, this wide-ranging safari highlights the best of two distinctive and delightfully unique regions.
17 days from $35,400 per person
Explore Southern Africa: South Africa, Zambia and East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania
The natural and human splendours of Cape Town, followed by luxurious game viewing in Phinda Private Game Reserve and Sabi Sand Game Reserve, ending with a watery bang at world-wondrous Victoria Falls.
13 Days from $31,300 per person
Explore Southern Africa: South Africa and Zambia
From the mesmerizing, miraculous Okavango Delta to mammoth Victoria Falls and the classic gamelands and safari experience of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.
14 Days from $26,800 per person
Explore Southern Africa: Botswana and Zimbabwe
Botswana’s astonishing contrasts—winding waterways, animal-rich savannahs, immense floodplains—plus the heart-stoppingly colossal cascades of Victoria Falls.
12 days from $22,800 per person
Explore Southern Africa: South Africa, Botswana and Zambia
Beginning with Namibia’s vast and gorgeous wilderness, then to the urban delights of Cape Town and its salubrious Winelands, ending with superb game viewing in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve.
15 Days from $26,900 per person
Explore Southern Africa: Namibia and South Africa
Astounding Victoria Falls is the centrepiece of this lovely UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it offers much more: river cruises on the mighty Zambezi River, and mini-safaris to view its wildlife, including rare black rhinos.
Sir Richard Branson’ Ulusaba is a luxurious private reserve beautifully tucked inside another private reserve right next to one of the world’s iconic national parks.
After a half-century in the safari business, we’re still astounded by Victoria Falls and our trips to the immense cascade are comprehensive and enthralling.
That the Okavango Delta is a stand-alone natural phenomenon is a given. Luckily for us, it’s surpassingly beautiful, animal-rich, and deeply reposeful.
Chobe was justly the first Botswanan national park, as it’s home to one the world’s richest populations of big, little, and always enchanting wildlife.
The Okavango Delta’s Linyati marshlands showcase the Okavango’s natural charisma: animals living freely, nature at its most serenely exciting, birds whirling and diving.
Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans, perhaps the planet’s largest salt flats, attract connoisseurs of one-of-a-kind landscapes and the highly adapted animals who call them home.
The Namib Desert’s elegantly shaped dunes are the world’s highest, rising like sandy tsunamis over stark, thought-provoking landscapes, under deep cerulean skies.
Supremely desolate, the Skeleton Coast reveals astonishing details, large and small: towering dunes, desert animals, and an endlessly theatrical meeting of land and water.
Kruger is South Africa’s most famous and its largest park—almost 5,700 Central Parks would fit neatly into its classic, golden veldt, river-crossed, acacia-dotted African landscapes.