3 Best Sights in The Eastern Cape, South Africa

Tucked away in the Eastern Cape, near the historic university "city" of Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown, and now increasingly run down), Kwandwe is a conservation triumph as more than 55,000 acres of various vegetation types and scenic diversity, including rocky outcrops, great plains, thorn thickets, forests, desert scrub, and the Great Fish River were just ravaged farmland and goat-ridden semidesert two decades ago. Today it's home to more than 7,000 mammals, including the Big Five and the elusive black rhino, and it's likely you'll see fauna you don't always see elsewhere, such as black wildebeest, bat-eared foxes, and the endangered blue crane (Kwandwe means "place of the blue crane" in isiXhosa). If you spend more than a couple of nights here, you'll likely see a huge and impressive array of animals, including leopards, lions, and herds of elephants marching across the terrain. If you come in winter, you'll see one of nature's finest floral displays, when thousands of scarlet, orange, and fiery-red aloes are in bloom, attended by colorful sunbirds. The reserve also has a strong focus on community development, as evinced by the Community Centre and village within the reserve, both of which are worth a visit.

Surrounded by the melancholic beauty of the Great Karoo with its scattered koppies and ridges of flat-topped mountains, Samara is a 67,000-acre private game reserve tucked beneath the Sneeuberg mountain range in the fabled plains of Camdeboo National Park some 45 minutes from the historic town of Graaff-Reinet. Owners Sarah and Mark Tompkins opened the reserve in 2005 with a promise to return former farmland to its natural state—the malaria-free reserve encompasses 11 former farms and is home to a variety of reintroduced species, including cheetah, lion, Cape mountain zebra, white rhino and desert-adapted black rhino, giraffe, black wildebeest, and a variety of antelope; there are also meerkats and aardvarks. By day, it’s a build-your-own-adventure of game drives, picnics atop the lofty heights of Mount Kondoa, and exploring the reserve’s topographical diversity at a civilized pace. Due to the lower density of predators and the sparseness of vegetation, rangers stop the game-viewers often so that guests can experience some of their safari on foot. One of its signature experiences is the opportunity to track a telemetry-collared rehabilitated cheetah and her family, and then get within whispering distance of them. The relatively low density of dangerous game also means this reserve is well-suited to families with children.

This is what Nieu Bethesda is best known for, and why tourists began traveling to this small, once-forgotten hamlet in the first place. Its creator, Helen Martins, was the subject of the Athol Fugard play, The Road to Mecca, which was made into a film starring Kathy Bates. The story of Helen Martins, who was born in 1897 and died in 1976, has been extensively elaborated upon, and the truth may never be known. Whether she was mad with grief, a visionary, or a mystic genius, the reclusive Martins externalized her loneliness by spending the last 30 years of her life (she eventually committed suicide) transforming her home into a jewel-box with bits of mirror and colorful crushed glass all designed to beautifully reflect the candlelight. Her wondrous vision then spread into her backyard, where she and her assistant Koos Malgas spent over a decade creating the country's most famous sculpture garden, a mystical world cluttered with concrete sirens (which everyone mistakenly calls mermaids), sphinxes, serpents, glittering peacocks, camels, owls, and wise men. The figures and scenes find their inspiration in the Bible, in William Blake, in the poetry of Omar Khayyam, and also in the visions and personal obsessions of Martins herself.  Her house and yard are now a gallery and museum at the heart of the village and worthy of an hour or two of your time.