Jean Spear
SOUTH AFRICA LESOTHO & SWAZILAND: THE ROUGH GUIDE by Barbra McCrea, Greg Mthembu-Salter, Tony Pinchuck & Donald Reid (Rough Guides)
Newly published, South Africa Lesotho & Swaziland: The Rough Guide provides a street-savvy, balanced guide to the southern tip of Africa.
The guide offers in-depth, to-the-point coverage of everything from boerewors to skelms to wine and national parks, and makes for an interesting and practical read for foreigners and locals alike.
Avoiding political correctness, the authors give honest impressions of the places they visit. From Fouriesburg to Fort Hare, these guys get down to the nitty gritty. They’ve found mampoer and cherry festivals as well as obscure places to hike, bike and explore.
Practical, not paranoid or alarmist, The Rough Guide’s safety tips sort the myths from the facts. Violence and crime are treated with caution, but not given unnecessary emphasis.
Most South Africans would find it a valuable resource for discovering getaways and adventurous weekends, and information on where to drink, eat and sleep and what to do in almost every small dorp or town in the country is easy to source.
The test of any good guidebook is if it can make Gauteng an interesting tourist spot and The Rough Guide does a pretty good job. Information about outdoor and indoor activities highlight the best the region has to offer.
Although the authors are all foreigners, they seem to have inside connections. They display an understanding of South African culture as if they had been living here for years. They even know about Spur salad bars and the latest club scenes in Cape Town, Durbs and Jo’burg.
“Braai, which rhymes with dry, is probably the only place you’ll catch an unreconstructed white South African man cooking,” the authors say, and there are plenty of anecdotes which lighten up fact-heavy text.
While there is an extensive photographic guide to the wildlife of the region, the book lacks scenic shots, which can be useful to first-time visitors to give impressions of the places they choose to visit.
Rough Guide is also accessible through the Net at www.roughguides.com, for basic information about the country, but all the details can be found in the printed version.
The site provides travelling news online and allows travellers to offer suggestions and post comments about the countries they visit.
In this way, the printed versions are constantly evolving with input from people who are on the road.