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If you hail from the northern hemisphere you won’t believe this, but South Africa probably has better cellphone (mobile telephone, GSM or cellular) coverage than your home country. More than 95% of the country – geographically, not by population – has excellent signal coverage. You really have to go way off the grid, deep into the Kalahari desert, for example, to be out of reach.

So no, you don’t need a satellite phone and yes, you can bring your mobile phone and roam. If you aren’t a regular traveller, just make sure the roaming option is active on your account. And remember that roaming charges are set by your home operator and likely range from the exorbitant to price-gouging status.

A better solution may be to rent a cellphone or just buy a local connection for your own handset. Every international airport in South Africa has a cellphone rental kiosk which will kit you out with an active handset that you can give back when you leave. But it’s definitely cheaper to buy a starter pack and to use pre-paid airtime. Less than $10 will get you a SIM card on one of the networks; from there on out you can buy airtime from any just about any retail outlet in the country, or from automatic teller machines, or by credit card over a mobile browser, or from vending machines. It’s more accessible than you think.

Oh, and if your cellphone supports a data connection then you’ll have a good time connecting to the internet. Our mobile data rates are pretty cheap and coverage is universal and pretty quick – if you can make a voice call you can get at least an EDGE connection, if not 3G or better.

Also relatively easy to find (in metropolitan areas) are internet connections good enough to make telephone calls over. If you stay in a decent hotel you should have WiFi access (which you will have to pay for, though), good coffee shops similarly have coverage. Internet cafes are somewhat scarcer these days, but again good hotels will have “business centres” with computers you can use at a price.

Whatever you do, don’t count on using payphones. They are hard to find, more than half require pre-paid cards and a good percentage are broken at any one time. If you absolutely must use a payphone, try looking for one indoors in a shopping centre, where your odds are better.

You’ve heard that South Africa is a little bit third-world and a little bit first-world, but did you know that the banking system is more sophisticated than just about anything in the world? True story.

Don’t worry about bringing cash of any kind. Your dollars and euros are worthless: nobody will accept them outside of the airport duty-free zones. Four-star hotels (and up) as well as all banks and fairly common change bureaux will change your cash into rands for you, but they will universally slaughter you with fees and rates. Do not, whatever you do, engage in back market or on-the-street money changing. It is illegal and there is no way that your new “friend” can beat the bank rates, so you are being scammed and probably robbed into the bargain. Travellers cheques are fine and can be widely changed. But by far the best is the humble credit card.

Anyone who wants to sell you anything will accept a credit card from Visa or Master Card, and most will take American Express and Diners Club too. Restaurants, cafes, hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, guest houses, liquor stores, clubs and strip joints. There are only two exceptions: petrol stations and roadside vendors (including informal sellers of curios and the like). Petrol stations because they aren’t by law allowed to accept credit card payment for fuel (which is a quirk of the fixed-price retail petrol system) and vendors because their volumes don’t justify the expense.

There is a simple solution to those problems too. Automatic teller machines (ATMs) are pervasive; no town is too small to have one. You’ll find them in malls, at petrol stations, inside hotels and shops. In deep rural areas you’ll find mini-terminals inside general dealer stores, which use a system whereby you are paid your cash from the cash register on presentation of a transaction slip.

There are occasional problems with card-skimming, where credit cards are cloned and then misused, a form of identity theft, basically. The incident rate is pretty low, but it’s worth watching your card just to be on the safe side. Any good restaurant will bring a portable card reader to your table rather than walk away with your card, and no retailer should need to take it out of your sight for any reason.

So one good credit card should meet all your requirements, just make sure it doesn’t run out of money while you are here.