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How to Get the Most Out of Greenwood Guides...
What can we do for you?
Whether you are a South African resident, a first-time visitor to the country, a seasoned overlander, or a holiday-home owner 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 have 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 is 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 would not find yourself.
Planning your journey
If you would like some help with booking your journey through South Africa, we would like to recommend Where It All Began. They are an ultra-sustainable and ethical travel consultancy based in Cape Town, South Africa. They will be happy to offer you any assistance you might need, from hotel bookings to car hire to internal flights and more besides. Partnering with experts who share our values ensures your trip supports the right people on the ground.
How to use the Guide
The guide works best if you start with the maps. You will 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 they 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 would like to visit on your journey, we suggest purchasing access to the full site which will give you complete access to all available routes.
We have 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 would 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. Taking your time is the only way to truly experience it.
What the Guide isn’t
We do not 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 these places do not have websites or marketing budgets to “be found” with.
For that reason, we do not list the obvious places to visit in a particular area, assuming that you will find those yourself through Google, TripAdvisor, and friends. Our job is to find those very special things you probably would not find yourself, or would not bother with because they are poorly represented online. These are the places that turn a trip from ordinary and OK into amazing and memorable.
We are 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 sources at the same time. There are many truly excellent international and national sites and books about South Africa which are much larger and more comprehensive than the Greenwood Guide. If you are only just starting to understand the country, we would really encourage you to make use of them in your planning. Particular favourites of ours are: