Bushveld & Battlefields

This arrangement explores the natural and historic heritage of two of South Africa’s provinces, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal and the independent kingdom of Swaziland. From our various comfortable hotels and lodges we visit two wildlife parks in search of the ‘Big Five’: the popular Kruger National Park and the less well-visited Umfolozi/Hluhluwe. The latter, the oldest game reserve in South Africa, contains an immense diversity of fauna and flora and is particularly famous for its conservation of the black and the white rhino. It contains hundreds of endangered black rhino and the largest population of white rhino in the world. The landlocked and independent kingdom of Swaziland nestles snugly and conveniently between South Africa and Mozambique and is one of Africa’s best kept secrets revealing mountainous grandeur, lush forests, fertile valleys and the hot still beat of the African lowveld as we cross this scenic ‘Switzerland of Africa’.

“To be ignorant of history is to remain always a child” – Cicero. The popular image of the Anglo Zulu war is to some extent coloured by the garrison battle at Rorke’s Drift featured in the 1964 film ‘Zulu’. It is perhaps (best) forgotten that on that same day (22 January 1879) the British Army experienced one of its bloodiest and most humiliating defeats at nearby Isandlwana.
The Anglo Boer War also features prominently in the history of the region and recalls the siege of Ladysmith, the exploits of Winston Churchill as a War Correspondent and the battles at Talana and Spioenkop all set against the glorious backdrop of the majestic Drakensberg Mountains. Known to the Zulu people as Ukhahlamba or ‘Barrier of Spears’ they provide a magnificent semi-circular border between KwaZulu-Natal and the inland mountain kingdom of Lesotho.