Where the fairway ends
and the bush begins

Three hundred years of vines, wrapped in mountains

Behind Cape Town's mountain wall the land folds into a series of high, hot valleys — Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl, Constantia — planted with vines since 1685 and hemmed in by granite peaks that turn violet at six in the evening. It is the oldest wine region in the southern hemisphere and, for a golfer, the most civilised base in Africa: Cape-Dutch gables, oak avenues, tasting rooms with a Michelin-level kitchen attached, and three championship courses laid out in the same valleys as the vineyards. You can play Pearl Valley in the morning under the Groot Drakenstein and be at a Boschendal table by two.

Three hundred kilometres of lagoon, forest and cliff-top golf

The N2 between Mossel Bay and Storms River is the drive every African road trip is built around: indigenous forest on one shoulder, the Indian Ocean on the other, and a chain of lagoons, passes and beach towns strung between them. It also happens to hold the densest concentration of great golf on the continent — Fancourt's three courses at George, Oubaai on the cliffs, Simola above the Knysna River, Pezula on the headland at Noetzie. Warm water, no malaria, no long transfers: everything is inside a two-hour drive of everything else.

Golf on the edge of the wildest park in Africa

Kruger is the size of Wales: 20,000 square kilometres of knobthorn, marula and mopane running 350 km north from the Crocodile River to the Limpopo, holding roughly 1,500 lion, 12,000 elephant and every one of the Big Five. What makes it extraordinary for a golfer is the geography — the park's southern boundary is also the tee box. Leopard Creek sits on a bluff above the Crocodile River looking directly into Kruger; Skukuza Golf Club is inside the park with no fence at all; Sabi River Sun runs along the Sabie at Hazyview. You play in the morning, you are on a game drive at four, and the escarpment of the Panorama Route — canyon, waterfalls, God's Window — is an hour behind you.