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Endless Summer Tours

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Which is the most amazing part of South Africa?

This is a question I’m often asked and a candidate for my personal favourite corner of the globe has to be iSimangaliso Wetland Park, the new name for what was formerly the Greater St Lucia Wetlands Park. We’re entering it today which fills me with joy. I’ve adventured here often in 4×4s over the years and had some amazing wildlife experiences in the many game reserves in the area.

Here are some of the good reasons to visit:

• Only in iSimangaliso and nowhere else on Earth could you hope to meet the oldest land mammal (the rhinoceros) and the largest terrestrial mammal (the elephant); the biggest marine mammal (the whale) and share an ecosystem with the world’s oldest fish (the coelacanth).
• If you’re lucky in one day you could see the Big Five and go on a night turtle drive to see these amazing creatures coming ashore to lay their eggs.
• It was South Africa’s first world heritage site and the St Lucia park was Africa’s first protection area with a conservation history stretching back more than a century.
• The coastline is the last significant breeding ground in South Africa for both the giant leatherback and loggerhead turtles.
• Lake St Lucia is Africa’s largest estuary and contains the continent’s greatest congregation of crocodiles and hippos.
• The 25 000-year-old coastal dunes are among the tallest vegetated dunes in the world.
• Lake Sibaya is the largest natural freshwater lake in the sub-continent.
• The sustainable fish traps of the Kosi Bay lakes date back 700 years and have been handed down from generation to generation.
• At St Lucia Mouth you meet sharks and crocodiles and wouldn’t want to swim there.
• Pristine beaches are a major attraction with the one near Rocktail Bay Lodge being named one of the 10 best in the world by an American outdoor magazine.
• The area boasts the world’s greatest concentration of black rhino.

So you can see why I love the place. I’ve had my best snorkelling experience here, swimming among ragged tooth sharks and turtles, as well as enjoying beach hikes where I was the only human in sight.

It’s a piece of heaven.