God's Other Country

"It is God's very own country"—someone had said after a brief visit to South Africa. I found this was no exaggeration but an understatement. After travelling the first 1,000 km in South Africa, I realised how hard it must have been for the whites to give up this paradise. Nature hasn't just showered its bounty on this country, it has poured it down in avalanches! In which other country can you drive, on excellent roads, 1,000 kilometres in eight hours? Where does the landscape change every 10 km from grasslands to tall equatorial trees to shrubs to thick dense forests to vineyards to orange groves? Is it any wonder that wild animals thrive in this latter day Eden; the carnivores and herbivores each content in God's acre provided for them? Where else can you feel the thrill of standing like a marker on an atlas as you take in the sweep that is Cape of Good Hope, or stay in a wooden cabin near George, on a mountain top with no other habitation and the only sound, that of the sea, hundreds of feet below?