Here are the available villas for rental in South Africa.

The land of hope that bowls a blinder

The Cricket World Cup will be held in South Africa for the first time in February and March next year.
With a total of 14 countries competing, it is a competition which is bound to attract an enormous number of supporters.
And while cricket is the main item on the menu, the competition will also provide a great chance for visitors to explore the many other delights of this fascinating country.
My wife and I have just come back from a two-week whistle-stop tour of the country and, against expectations, it turned out to be one of the most exciting experiences of my life.
We started off in Natal with a guided tour of the Boer War and Zulu War battlefields.
It was a four-hour drive from Durban (where Kingsmead will host a number of World Cup fixtures) to the epicentre of the Boer War, Spion Kop, where the Boers gave the British a drubbing in a crucial early battle.
The discomfort suffered by the British troops at Spion was in stark contrast to our own conditions.
We stayed at first-class lodges throughout our trip, proving how the South African tourist industry has made galloping progress in recent years.
The accommodation was among the best I have experienced. And the country represents excellent value for money.
The Spion Kop Lodge, for instance, produced great comfort at absurdly cheap prices for Brits, who collect 17 Rands or more for every pound. ... more

The elephant exodus

From the Daily Mail

One battered British passport, one suitcase of clothes and a herd of elephants are all that is left of the privileged world of Rory Hensman since he and his wife Lindie were forced to flee across the South African border in March.
For the man who used to play polo at Windsor Great Park with the Prince of Wales, and whose house guests once included Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles and the then Rhodesian governor, Lord Soames, it has been a vertiginous fall from grace.
Yet, this 56-year-old farmer counts himself lucky.
At least he and his wife are still alive - unlike many white farmers driven from their lands under Robert Mugabe's regime.
'Mugabe's "war veterans" invaded my farm and slaughtered my herd of 600 impala, killed all the kudu and sable antelopes,' says Hensman.
'They butchered my warthogs and were using my polo ponies for spear practice.
'What took me and my father 50 years to build up, they have destroyed in two,' he says.
Rory's grandfather was cited for a VC during World War I, before being appointed British Military Attache to Washington and moving to Rhodesia in the 1920s.
Now, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of a game-reserve owner in neighbouring South Africa, Rory is rebuilding his life. ... more

Sleeping with the lions

With about 20 years' experience as a game ranger in the African bush, Les Brett is South Africa's answer to Crocodile Dundee. He is about as qualified as they come.
He has passed all the exams (such as the one where they stick trainees in front of a charging buffalo to see how they react).
For me, being a game ranger was always something of a childhood dream.
But to do it for real would take at least five years of lectures, training and endless exams. I had 10 days.
So I joined a crash course in a wilderness reserve called Timbavati, next to Kruger National Park in South Africa - with Les the senior instructor.
A reserve of flat grass and bush-covered plains, Timbavati is home to three main categories of animals: dangerous, invisible and endearing.
The dangerous ones are the snakes, scorpions and spiders.
The invisible ones, such as aardvarks and honey badgers, prefer to keep themselves to themselves. <br/> The endearing ones, such as elephants, are the animals most people visit Timbavati to see.
On the training course, we learned how to handle venomous snakes and how to stitch a wound using termites that can bite through leather. ... more

It's not just cricket

Don't worry, you'll be fine. This was the advice given to us by a South African friend when we mentioned our holiday plans.
They were words we wanted to hear, as our nine-day whirlwind tour of the (hopefully) hot and sunny north-eastern corner of the country involved an awful lot of driving through very remote areas.
Doomsayers warn that South Africa is a land of murder, mayhem and strife, and it is certainly true that the Rainbow Nation has a crime problem almost unrivalled in the world.
But anyone contemplating a visit to this phenomenally attractive country should keep this in perspective. Violent crime is concentrated in the townships, the vast, depressing urban sprawls that are the legacy of apartheid.
Our goal was somewhere rather different, which I had heard about from friends and seen on the internet, a magical-sounding place nestling among the sand dunes on the vast, open beaches that fringe the coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal on the Indian Ocean.
It is miles from anywhere and, we were told, offers unparalleled luxury. Its name? Rocktail Bay. Our trip started in Johannesburg, the gateway to the northern provinces. A monster of a place, the richest, brashest city in Africa and has better restaurants and bars than Cape Town its more photogenic rival in the south.
But we didn't fly 5,700 miles to take in city sights. We wanted sunshine, scenery and wildlife, so we headed east.
The route to the Natal coast takes in the Highveld of the Eastern Transvaal. Little visited by tourists, this is a land of lush, high, rolling grasslands, more like the South Downs than the archetypal image of hot and dusty Africa.
Skirting the border of Swaziland, the road soon veers south - and down. The border itself, a 10ft-high fence, runs alongside the road. On the other side are Swazi villages, and the inhabitants were using the fence as a washing line.
Is this the only place in the world where underpants fluttering in the wind mark an international boundary? Soon we were snaking down to the dusty rolling hills of Zululand as the temperature climbed ten degrees in as many miles.
First stop was the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi game reserve. This is a marvellous place, an arcadia compact enough to drive round in a day and with all the 'Big Five' present - elephant, hippo, buffalo, lion and rhino. ... more

All aboard the opulent express

From the Mail on Sunday

An entire holiday aboard a train? When you're used to ordeal by overcrowding on the delayed 7.32 to London Marylebone, you feel it's an offer you can refuse. Yet the leisured classes of South Africa think committing themselves to rails for weeks at a time is the height of self-indulgence.
Looking at their trains, you can see their point. Luxury trains like the Blue Train and Rovos Rail are hardly trains at all in the sense understood by London Underground and Connex South East. These are trains as our great-grandparents understood them, conceived, like the South African landscape, on the grandest of scales.
Step on board Rovos Rail's Pride of Africa and the first words that come into your head are likely to be - as they were for me - 'Orient Express'. In fact, Rovos Rail traces its pedigree back through a more African line, to such turn-of-the-century grand trains as the Zambezi Express and the Imperial Mail. But the general impression is correct. This is a train that aspires to opulence rather than punctuality.
We joined the Pretoria-bound train at Komatipoort, on the Mozambique border. Outside, an oven-hot sun was baking a long, empty platform, with the most African of frontier towns sprawled inertly behind and what looked like a vulture circling overhead.
Inside, we were instantly back in Europe. Hot light gave way to cool shadows. The station's nagging odours of sweat, dust and engine oil vanished in a fragrance of fresh furniture polish. Every compartment on the Pride of Africa is a suite, panelled, carpeted and cushioned like a miniature hotel room.
There is brass and mahogany on all sides, with pre-war period details - telephones, basins, shutters - that would do credit to a BBC mini-series. The dining-car at the front of the train is a miniature cathedral of mahogany arches and Victorian lamps. The observation car at the rear suggests the clubhouse of one of the stuffier Home Counties golf clubs: a plush bar-cum-lounge with monogrammed antimacassars, lots of big windows, and, remarkably, a wall made almost entirely of glass. ... more