The countryside

 

Wine country near Cape Town

South Africa contains many of the landscapes familiar in the United States — and you don’t have to drive as far to see them.

 

Cape Town is as beautiful (and fun, I’m told) as San Francisco.

Johannesburg is South Africa’s New York City.

Pretoria’s suburbs remind me of new suburbs nearPhoenix, Ariz.

The desert areas here are like the U.S. Southwest.

The many rolling plains remind me of the Great Plains in the U.S.

The wine country is like California’s Napa Valley or New York’s Finger Lakes Region.

The mountains remind me of driving in Colorado.

And the beaches are like Florida — with a lot colder water.

Then there are wildlife parks with no U.S. equivalent. You feel as if you stepped into a world hundreds of thousands of years old, where all the wild beasts still roam.

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