South Africa: Country Profile

South Africa is a land of astonishing beauty. Ironic, then, that European visitors generally touch down in the one part of the country to which these adjectives are seldom applied. Johannesburg boasts perhaps the greatest concentration of skyscrapers on the continent; its indentikit shopping malls and seemingly endless sprawl of suburbs are a far cry from the image of untamed wilderness most people associate with Africa.

A striking aspect of Johannesburg, at least to the unintiated, are the flat-topped yellow hills that dot its outskirts. These mine dumps are glowing reminders of the fact that southern Africa's wealthiest, most populous and fastest growing city stands over the richest seams of gold ever discovered.

Johannesburg was founded as recently as 1888, and little effort was made to beautify the place even then - few people thought the mining shanty town would last more than 20 years. Sadly, this formative aesthetic has survived into the modern era. Johannesburg has many assets - it is a vibrantly cosmopolitan city, with a near perfect climate - but attractive it is not.

Most tourists spend little time in South Africa's heaving commercial centre. The better-advised ones head straight up the 60km of highway that leads north to the official capital of Pretoria: staid, sleepy, and best known to Westerners for the Union Buildings outside which President Mandela was inaugurated in 1994.

Could any two cities be more different in character than Johannesburg and Cape Town? Many long-time globetrotters rank Cape Town with Rio and Sydney as perhaps the most visually arresting in the world. It is also South Africa's oldest city. It nestles between the Atlantic coast and the incomparable Table Mountain on a bay settled by the Dutch in 1652.