About us
What is the Greenwood Guide?
Welcome to the Greenwood Guide! We’re South Africa’s oldest independent guidebook, now in our 20th year. We are a unique approach to a travel website: we handpick (as in personally inspect) every single place we list through a network of contributors who report back on places to stay, eat and play in their own communities around the country. These contributions are constantly updated through our site so everything you see is live and up to date, every day.
Who are we?
We’re a team of independent associates, each with separate skills that we bring to the project, but none of us work exclusively for Greenwood. All of us are South Africans from various cultures and parts of the country and we each bring a unique perspective to the guide. Most of us don’t even work in the tourism industry.
GG is a community – that’s the contributors (that’s us), the travellers (that’s you) and the subscribers (those we list in GG). The guide’s strength lies in the contributions we receive from that community – and as such we genuinely welcome all your comments, ideas, photos, videos at any time. The site lists all the usual ways to get in touch. If you’d like to join the community as a contributor, please visit this page which will tell you what we’ll need to see from you.
What can we do for you?
Whether you’re a South African resident or citizen, a first-time visitor to the country, a seasoned overlander or a holiday-home own here, we offer a wide range of ideas to explore the country in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable way. We offer accommodation and dining suggestions at a range of budgets and try to include a broad mix of activities from the cultural to the sedate to the active, the guided and the not.
We’ve divided the country up into ten ‘Routes’. You can either see these as literal routes to be followed in chronological order or you can see them as suggestions for what to see and do in a given area. Each route could take a week or many months to travel: it’s entirely up to you and your budget. Each route has a map and each stop on that route has another, more detailed map to use for navigation.
The Routes offer you between 5 and 10 stops and at each stop, we suggest a range of places to stay, visit and eat, most of which you probably wouldn’t find yourself.
What do we actually do?
So what can you expect from us? We’re on the road in Morticia, our overland truck, for at least six months of the year, visiting, researching, writing, blogging. The other six months we’re office-based in Cape Town, writing up, editing and producing. The site is constantly updated as we’re on the road, so every time you access it, it will be fully up-to-date.
What the Guide isn’t
We don’t set out to be ‘the’ guidebook to an entire area or in any way to be comprehensive – our role is to shine a particular light on the independent, the ethical and the responsible places to visit, eat and stay in South Africa, many of whom don’t have websites or marketing budgets to ‘be found’ with. For that reason, we don’t list the obvious places to visit in a particular area, assuming that you’ll find those yourself through Google, TripAdvisor and friends – our job is to find those very special things you probably wouldn’t find yourself, or wouldn’t bother with because they are poorly marketed/represented online. These are the places that turn a trip from ordinary and OK into amazing and memorable.
We’re fully aware that travellers these days are unlikely to use a single site or book to plan their trips, more often than not making use of several sites and books at the same time to plan. There are so many truly excellent international and national sites and books about South Africa which are much larger and more comprehensive than the Greenwood Guide – so if you’re only just starting to understand the country, we’d really encourage you to make use of them in your reading and planning. Particular favourites of ours are:
Why do you list some places and not others?
We don’t set a single or multiple standard for what is ethical, what is responsible. Rather, we start with looking at what the establishment is already doing and ask them what they still intend to do. Being ethical and being responsible are so multi-faceted and often, in being more responsible/ethical in one area, you become less responsible/ethical in another. It is not, we feel, our remit to impose standards on establishments to which they must adhere in order to be listed – rather they should set out what they feel the business can support and set their own goals.
We tend not to list establishments that form part of a large group: for instance, we won’t list a hotel that forms part of a large chain, no matter how ethical it may be, nor will we list services that are part of a national group (such as SANParks accommodation, unless it’s really special). The focus is always towards the independent and ethical.
We’ll not list an establishment simply because it’s ethical in some small way – for example, many or even most bush camps are solar-powered because, frankly, it’s cheaper, quieter and more convenient than a diesel generator. That in itself does not make a bush camp ethical – the bush camp would also need to demonstrate a commitment to increase its ethicality/responsibility and importantly, be seen to taking real steps to make those commitments real.
Our role, then, is to shine a light on those establishments that have a genuine, engaging commitment in everything they do in their business to become more ethical and responsible, in such a way that makes sense for the context, budget and circumstances of that business. What is ethical and responsible in central Cape Town is totally different from what is ethical and responsible in rural Limpopo.
If we feel that there is a commitment, but no real action, or worse no real commitment, just tokenism, we’d not list a place or even delist a place we had previously listed.
Independent travel in South Africa.
There used to be two types of traveller: those who want everything to be planned right down to fine details before they leave (either planning it themselves or getting some help from an agent) and those who want nothing to be planned at all before they leave. These days, that distinction is getting much less well-defined. Travellers increasingly make use of machine-based booking services (e.g. Booking.com) or human-based booking services (e.g. specialised travel agencies) for some parts of the trip and leave large sections of the trip open. Others like to get help for their first visit and then travel with less help in later trips, or only get help when they are going to a new area.
If you’re reading this, you’re obviously considering travelling independently in South Africa: the country is in many ways a challenging destination for independent travel, no matter whether you live here, how many times you have visited before or no matter how many independent trips you have done elsewhere in the world.
At GG, we strongly advise planning at least a basic framework for your trip before you leave: that would normally mean making sure as a minimum that you have your transport and your accommodation booked in advance for at least 70% of the trip. The reasons for this are:
- Travel time and distances within South Africa often bear no relation to each other – you need to leave at least 30% more time than you think you’ll need to get from A – B and that means planning your route.
- You need to pay attention to your personal security and your belongings – this means someone needs to be expecting you to arrive or come home each evening.
- At particular times of year (especially December, January and Easter) much of South Africa is fully booked up to a year or more in advance.
- The more remote you go, the more you have to plan for essentials like food, water and fuel
- South Africa is inherently unpredictable – which of course is part of the appeal – but you need an adaptable plan to stop your trip becoming stressful.
- No matter how well we at GG research, things change very fast on the ground in SA.
At GG, we’re always available at any time with advice at any time on any aspect of your trip. Just drop us a line. Even better, if you’d like us to turn your wish list into the perfect trip, we can do that, planning and booking as much or as little as you’d like us to.
Independent travel is great, but it’s even better if you know that someone’s got your back.
How to use the Guide
The guide works best if you start with the maps. You’ll notice that we have a lot of maps! The maps have two roles: one is to inspire you to travel to a particular area and the other is to show you how to get from place to place.
All of the maps (Overview and Route) are images overlaid onto a Google Map, so are drawn to scale. However, the Overview and Route maps are not intended to be used for navigation: they are more to give you a feel for an area and to encourage you to go look more closely. We suggest that you always zoom in (on our site) or open up the maps for actual navigation.
Once you have some idea of which Route or Routes you’d like to visit on your journey, we’d suggest purchasing access to the full site which will give you complete access to all available routes.
We’ve created the Routes in such a way that they are either circular (meaning you can start anywhere you like along the route) or linear (meaning that they connect onto another Route both at the start and end). We definitely do not recommend trying to complete any of our Routes in less than one week and for some Routes you’d need much more. Each Route has between 6 and 10 stops and each one of those stops would need at least a night or two in order to see it and enjoy it. South Africa is a very big and very diverse place.