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There is a place in South Africa where you can find perfect white beaches, predictable (and not at all dangerous) surf and a decent towel service. That place is not along any of our many thousands of kilometres of shoreline. It is in the landlocked, Africanised fairy tale complex of debauchery and sin called Sun City. It is the Valley of the Waves, and if you are willing to discard authenticism then it is quite possibly the happiest place in South Africa.

Sun City itself is a slowly decaying holdover from the Apartheid-era ban on gambling. It was built in the middle of nowhere because that is where the former (gambling-friendly) homeland that housed it was, and South Africans streamed hence because there were so very few other legal places to show their mathematical ineptitude by taking part in rigged games of chance. Now that you can gamble just about anywhere, fewer are willing to make the 1.5-odd hour drive from Johannesburg or Pretoria, so things aren’t quite what they used to be. The glitz is wearing awful thin in places.

The Valley of the Waves was a relatively late addition to this complex (which before then consisted almost entirely of hotels, golf courses and dimly lit rooms where women danced on stage without first covering their breasts). We’re betting that it will also be the last part of the complex to crumble for lack of cashflow, because during the summer months it can still attract a capacity crowd over a long weekend or on a public holiday.

It’s a partially-themed water park, okay? This is Africa; we don’t have that many theme parks or water parks, so we get inordinately excited by that kind of thing. Don’t be so judgemental. This is the closest thing we have to Disneyland: everything is fake or glitzy or both, and carefully engineered to not strain or stress. The wave pool produces child-friendly swells, the death-defying water slides come nowhere close to killing you and the ice cream is always cold. Also, there will be people who are fatter than you are, and neither them nor the good-looking ones will notice your imperfect body (unlike some other places we could name).

That is exactly the kind of escape your average jaded Johannesburger longs for on occasion. And after a couple of weeks of cultural immersion, dusty safaris and weird foods, it’s the kind of place where tourists love to decompress before going back home, or venturing further into the continent. Especially if they have kids. Kids are crazy about the place, as are their parents once they realise that the Valley is a safe environment where they can let the little monsters run wild while mommy and daddy get mildly buzzed on drinks with little umbrellas in them.

If you have the money to spring for the 5-star Palace of the Lost City hotel you get access to a heated outdoor pool. If you hang with the plebs instead, then you have to swim in naturally-heated water, but given that this part of the country is about a finger-width away from officially being a desert, that isn’t a real problem. The weather is invariably glorious all through spring and summer, and if you go there outside of local school holidays and weekends you’ll have the entire place to yourself. Except for the odd (and typically quite entertaining) Japanese or German tour group.

If you get bored from all the predictability and lack of danger, there are always exorbitantly-priced game drives at the Pilanesberg Nature Reserve right next door, or even more exorbitantly priced balloon safaris. You can get better (and cheaper) of both elsewhere, however. If you go to Sun City, go purely for the Valley of the Waves. Lie under a beach umbrella all day while polite servers bring you cool drinks. If anyone asks, don’t admit that you went because the real Africa got you down. Just say you were trying to recreate the experience of being a white colonialist of the previous century.

It’s as fake as a very fake thing indeed, but that is the perverse charm of the Mama Tembos restaurant – and the whole reason why we point photo-hungry tourists there.

See, not everybody is cut out for a real township tour. And that’s okay, really. Most of us don’t go to Europe and then seek out the poor and dirty neighbourhoods either. Many of us don’t even visit the site of a former Nazi concentration camp, because on some holidays you don’t want to be weighed down with the miseries of the past. You just want Disney World: sanitised, mindless, and ever-so-superficially happy.

That just about sums up Mama Tembos. It’s right in the heart of Linden, an upper middle-class suburb where the cars are shiny and the gardens filled with trees. It’s actually right across the road from a small television production facility. But it pretends really hard to be straight from the township, at least in terms of decor.

The decor is, of course, fake. So is the the menu, which features items with names that reference popular soccer teams and not-so-popular politicians, except the average township tavern has never heard of prawns (and doesn’t sell a lot of premium steak either).

All of which is just perfect. There isn’t a single thing on the menu that is even exotic, never mind gross. The service is good, and in English, and the kitchen is free of gut-rotting bacteria and the stench of the final bowel movements of freshly slaughtered animals. The bathrooms have running water. And you know what? Your friends back home will never be able to spot the fake decor in the background to your awesome pictures. To all intents and purposes you’d have been on that mandatory township tour, at least as far as any of them will ever know. It can be our little secret, promise.

Think of it this way: when you go to the medieval-themed castle in Disney World you don’t have skewered heads on display or diseased men pissing in the corners. Sometimes sanitised is good.

Mama Tembos
Cnr 4th avenue and 7th street, Linden
Johannesburg
Tel: 011 912 7770
www.mamatembo.co.za

There’s nothing quite like going into their homes, pointing at them, and then discussing them loudly in a foreign language to make poor people feel like animals in a zoo. Then again, poor people will do a lot of things for money, and letting you do the whole pointing-and-talking thing is not the most demeaning by quite a long way. Thus was born the township tour.

Townships, in case you’ve somehow missed this until now, are the ghettos where white people made black people live because that’s just the way Apartheid rolled. For foreigners these remnants of an unjust past can have a lot of romance as the site of the 1976 riots, for instance, or for featuring the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, or just because a lot of poor black people are charmingly going about their daily lives in such a genuinely authentic manner.

The problem is that townships aren’t what they used to be. We don’t have our riots in them anymore; these days we hold protest marches in front of government office buildings, because the police don’t cage black people in any more. Mandela and Tutu once lived in Soweto, sure, but they haven’t for decades; they moved to the suburbs a long time ago, as did a great many people with the money to do so.

The most shocking truth about the townships – from the point of view of tourists, anyway – is that they aren’t poor and dirty any more, at least not universally. As the income inequality gap between black people and everybody else has been normalising, so money has been flowing into the townships. The net combined effect has been tremendous, and you can now find a growing number of shiny new shopping malls and franchise retail outlets in townships. Look just to the left of the comfortable new family homes and just to the right of the emerald green sports fields, and you’ll find them.

A good tour guide can still give you a sense of a universally desperate (and repressed) people scrabbling for existence by careful manipulation of the bus route. Please do flip these kinds of tour guides the bird, if your township tour is a must, and choose somebody who’ll take you walkabout or cycling. And under no circumstances should you hand over money to anybody who hasn’t taken you to a local tavern, even if it is a sanitised tourist trap. Telling the folks back home that you drank with the locals in some shitty joint is the best story you’re likely to get.

Oh, and you can take pictures. The poor ignorant natives will not think you are trying to steal their souls with your demon box. Remember: not everybody who doesn’t speak English is a noble savage. Some are just people.

Dullstroom is one of those tourist traps that attracts more locals than foreigners. It’s about three hours out of Johannesburg and Pretoria – close enough to be a weekend escape for Safricans, but a little too out of the way for most tourists. Except the ones who want to fly-fish for trout. Dullstroom is smack in the middle of the only real fly fishing area in the country (though parts of the Western Cape do pretend to the throne.)
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That, unfortunately, is about all that Dullstroom has to offer. The scenery isn’t bad, so you can do the hiking or horse-riding thing, but frankly there are more spectacular places to do that all over the country. The major attraction, and we ain’t kidding, is the fact that it has the highest railway station in the country (just over 2 000 meters above sea level). So, with a flood of bored housewives abandoned by their fishing husbands and desperately eager to spend money somehow, Dullstroom has been transformed into a cute little shopping village. There is an astounding amount of ugly contemporary art, beadwork and suchlike on sale all over the place. The town also has some unexpected speciality stores, such as one offering nothing but clocks, mostly grandfather clocks.

It also has an incidence of restaurants that is utterly outrageous given the size and location of the town – and here you can find some of the finest trout dishes served anywhere in the world.

We’re not all that into Dullstroom – we bore too easily – but it’s a good place to run away to if you need to get out of the cities but still want to stay somewhere with running water, underfloor heating and satellite television.

Speaking of heating, beware of Dullstroom and surrounds in the winter. The place gets cold, really, really cold. It is no accident that the town features a fairly large purveyor of ski clothing. Take a scarf, and if you are staying over enquire as to the availability of fire places and electric blankets. If your car’s heater is broken, don’t go.

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Howzzzt recommends: 2Chefs Bistro, Dullstroom