Rovos Rail African Trilogy

You will be met at the airport and transferred to African Pride Irene Country Lodge.  This exquisite hotel is designed to give you an authentic farm experience and a haven of peace and tranquility in the midst of the city.  To ensure that everyone has a very relaxing first night in Africa we have arranged for all rooms to be single occupancy.

Accommodations:  African Pride Irene Country Lodge (all rooms will be single occupancy for this hotel)

Established in 1982, Swazi Candles is a manufacturing company based in the beautiful Kingdom of eSwatini in Southern Africa. They create handcrafted, highly decorative animal and geometric shaped candles in hundreds of patterns and colours. The workshop is music-filled and vibrant where guests are invited to interact with the artisans. Swazi Candles is surrounded by other talented crafters, artists and artisans as well as a bustling market and souvenir shops.

The Swazi cultural village at Mantenga is a living museum of old traditions, representing a classical Swazi lifestyle during the 1850s.

After lunch at Mantenga Lodge will we go back aboard our train for the evening as it makes its way to Hluhluwe- Imfolozi Park.

Accommodations:  Rovos Rail Luxury Train

The park is home to Africa’s big five game: elephant, rhinoceros (black and white), Cape buffalo, lion and leopard and many other species of animals.  It is one of the top view spots for Nyala, a type of antelope.

After the game drive we will return to the train for lunch.  Then relax as we make our way to Empangeni.

Accomodations: Rovos Rail Luxury Train

The Durban Botanic Gardens (Est. 1849) is currently Africa’s oldest surviving botanic garden and remains a national and local city asset actively contributing to plant conservation and plant-based education. The Durban Botanic Gardens Trust was established in 1993 to support the garden’s key strategic areas in biodiversity, culture, education, heritage, horticulture, people and plants, and research.

We will have lunch in Umhlanga and then return to the train.  Enjoy the view as our train traverses the Vally of a Thousand Hills.The Valley of a 1000 Hills forms around the majestic valley created by the Mngeni River and it’s tributaries. A magnificent gorge between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, the Valley of 1 000 Hills is about more than its spectacular greenery and the clear blue of the African sky.

Accommodations:  Rovos Rail Luxury Train

British businessmen Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato made their fortunes in Kimberley, and the roots of the De Beers company can also be traced to the early days of the mining town. Kimberley was the first city in the Southern Hemisphere and the second in the world after Philadelphia to integrate electric street lights into its infrastructure on September 2, 1882. The first Stock Exchange in Africa was also built in Kimberley, as early as 1881.

The observation car will be leading the train until after Tea.  Travel through the Karoo, a vast semi-desert region that was once an enormous inland sea.  Over millions of years, volcanic matter was ground down and deposited as silt upon the seabed to form what geologists call the Karoo system. It’s defined by its topography, geology, climate and, above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies and extremes of heat and cold. The Karoo also hosted a well-preserved ecosystem hundreds of million years ago, which is now represented by many fossils. The Karoo formed an almost impenetrable barrier to the interior from Cape Town so the early adventurers, explorers, hunters and travellers on their way to the Highveld unanimously denounced it as a frightening place of great heat, great frosts, great floods and great droughts. Today, it is still a place of great heat and frosts and an annual rainfall of between 50 and 250mm, though on some of the mountains it can be 250 to 500mm higher than on the plains. However, underground water is found throughout the Karoo, which can be tapped by boreholes, making permanent settlements and sheep farming possible.

Accommodations:  Rovos Rail Luxury Train

It originated as a mission station established in 1871 and run by Reverend Christiaan Schröder. The mission station now houses the town museum, known as the Kalahari Orange Museum. The museum is also the home of a donkey statue, which recognises the enormous contribution that this animal made to the development of the region during the pioneering days of the 19th century. Upington is the closest centre to the Augrabies Falls and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. The landscape is very arid but the soil is fertile and crops such as fruit are grown in irrigated fields. The area is best known for its export-quality grapes, raisins and wines, which are cultivated on the rich flood plains of the Orange River.

Accommodations: Rovos Rail Luxury Train

After lunch on the train we continue along the Southern reaches of the Kalahari Basin on our way to Garas Park. The quiver tree or Aloidendron dichotomumis probably the best-known aloe found in South Africa and Namibia. This distinctive tree aloe has smooth branches, which are covered with a thin layer of whitish powder that helps to reflect away the hot sun’s rays. The bark on the trunk forms beautiful golden-brown scales but be aware that the edges of these scales are razor sharp. The crown is often densely rounded as a result of the repeatedly forked branches, hence the species name dichotoma meaning ‘forked’. The blue-green leaves are borne on terminal rosettes but in juvenile plants the leaves are ranked in vertical rows.

Accommodations:  Rovos Rail Luxury Train

Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan surrounded by high red dunes located in the southern part of the Namib Desert in the Namib-Naukluft National Park of Namibia. Vlei is the Afrikaans word for “marsh” while “sossus” is Nama for “no return” or “dead-end”. Sossusvlei owes this name to the fact that it is an endorheic drainage basin (a drainage basin without outflows) for the ephemeral Tsauchab River.

Accommodations: Sossusvlei Lodge

The wind in the Sossusvlei area blows from all directions causing the sand to form a star shape with multiple arms, hence the name “star dunes”.

Return to the lodge to freshen up and use the facilities before our one hour flight to Windhoek.  Enjoy lunch and then we will visit the Transport Museum. The Trans-Namib Museum is located in historical Windhoek railway station building. The museum was officially opened on 1 July 1993. The exhibition consists wide range of railway equipment, maps and related items date back to German colonial times and South African administration. Outside of the museum you can see old locomotives including the first diesel locomotive in the country, one of the first machinery used in the country where first railway lines were built.

Accommodations:  Rovos Rail Luxury Train

Their holistic conservation strategy is the key to success in saving the cheetah and its ecosystem. They work to develop best practices that benefit the entire ecosystem upon which the cheetah depends and also address the concerns for wildlife populations and the human communities that share the landscape.

Accommodations: Rovos Rail Luxury Train

Etosha was proclaimed a game reserve in 1907 by the Governor of German South West Africa.  The park offers great game viewing and is home to hundreds of species of mammals, birds and reptiles including several threatened and endangered species.

Accommodations: Mokuti Lodge