KwaZulu-Natal

Durban is South Africa's third city and its most immediately likeable — a working Indian Ocean port with a long beachfront promenade, warm water year-round and a surfing culture that has produced a large share of the country's competitive surfers. The beachfront runs for kilometres past piers and paddling pools and is genuinely used by the whole city rather than by tourists. What sets Durban apart, though, is its food. The city has the largest population of Indian descent anywhere outside India, the result of arrivals from the 1860s onward, and a century and a half of separate development has produced a cuisine of its own — hotter and more reduced than most Indian regional cooking, and centred on the hollowed-loaf curry that is the city's contribution to the national table — what that dish actually is, and why its name has nothing to do with rabbits, belongs to the food guide. The covered markets in the centre sell the spice mixes that make it work. It is not a beautiful city in the way Cape Town is, and it does not try to be; it is a warm, humid, unpretentious one with excellent food and a beach.

Inland, the ground rises to a basalt escarpment that runs for hundreds of kilometres and tops three thousand metres — the highest range in southern Africa, and a UNESCO site for both its landscape and what is painted on its rocks. The signature formation is an enormous curved cliff wall several kilometres across, over which the country's highest waterfall drops in a series of leaps and frequently blows back up in the wind. The walking here is the best in South Africa and it ranges properly: valley strolls between rivers and pools, full days up to the escarpment rim, and multi-day routes onto the plateau for the experienced and self-sufficient. Conditions change fast and the summer afternoons bring violent thunderstorms, so mountain weather deserves mountain respect here as anywhere. One notable route out of the province is the steep, hairpinned pass climbing the escarpment into the mountain kingdom next door — a genuine four-wheel-drive road and a spectacular day's drive.

The Drakensberg holds the greatest concentration of San rock art anywhere in the world — tens of thousands of individual paintings across many hundreds of shelters and overhangs, made over a period spanning thousands of years. They are not decorative scenes. Much of the imagery relates to the spiritual practice of the people who made it, with recurring figures of eland and of human forms in states of transformation, and the interpretation of that symbolism is one of the more remarkable pieces of archaeological work of the last century. Several sites are open with guided access and interpretive centres, which is the right way to see them: a guide turns a wall of ochre figures into something legible. Visiting is quiet, uncrowded and completely unlike anything else on a South African itinerary, and it is astonishing how few visitors to the country make time for it.

North along the coast, the land flattens into a UNESCO-listed mosaic of estuary, lake, swamp forest, grassland and some of the highest vegetated dunes on earth. The estuary system holds large populations of hippo and crocodile, and boat trips onto the water at dusk are the standard and excellent way to see them. Offshore, the coral reefs at the northern end are the southernmost in Africa and offer genuinely good diving and snorkelling in warm water; loggerhead and leatherback turtles come ashore to nest on these beaches in the southern summer, and guided night walks to watch a nesting turtle are among the most affecting wildlife experiences in the country. Humpback whales pass offshore in winter. It is a great deal of very different habitat in one protected area, and it rewards several days rather than an afternoon.

Inland from the wetland sits the oldest proclaimed game reserve in Africa, established in the nineteenth century and considerably older than the more famous park to the north. It is hilly, green and much more compact than Kruger, which makes for a different rhythm — shorter drives, denser bush, and a genuine sense of the terrain rather than of distance. It carries the full complement of large mammals, and it is above all a rhino place: this is where the southern white rhino was pulled back from a population low enough to make extinction a realistic prospect, through a protection and relocation programme that is the reason the species exists in numbers anywhere today. As elsewhere, guides here are discreet about exactly where rhino have been seen, and that discretion is worth respecting rather than testing. For visitors who want a serious safari without flying to the north-east, this is the province's answer.

Durban's airport connects to the other main cities in about two hours, which is how most visitors arrive; the province is a long drive from anywhere else. A hire car is close to essential once here, because the Drakensberg trailheads, the wetland park and the reserve are all rural and the distances between them are real. Roads are generally good. As for timing, the province inverts the usual South African advice: winter, from about May to September, is dry, mild, clear and the best time for both the mountains and game viewing, while summer is hot, humid and thunderstormy on the coast and often clouded in the mountains. Summer does bring the turtles ashore and the greenest landscapes. And in the colder months an extraordinary marine event runs up this coast — vast shoals of sardines moving north with predators following them in numbers, visible from the shore in a good year, and entirely dependent on water temperature rather than on the calendar.