Eastern Cape – Fort Beaufort

Neatly tucked underneath the Winterberg mountains in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, liess the citrus valley of Fort Beaufort.

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Entry into the Eastern Cape is likely to be along the N2 from Cape Town, where you’ll be struck by the beauty of the Tsitsikamma National Park, before the landscape flattens out past Cape St Francis and Jeffrey’s Bay, through Port Elizabeth and on to East London.

Inland to the north are the rolling hills of Grahamstown and surrounding ‘settler country’, which soon gives way to the majesty of the semiarid Karoo, dotted with intriguing towns such as Graaff-Reinet. Beyond East London lies the subtropical Wild Coast, and to the north the mountain ranges of the North-Eastern Highlands. You get the picture: for its relative size, the province has a remarkable range of differing climates, topographies and vegetation.It has a complex history, too, one of settlement, migration, tragedy and conflict. In the 19th century, Trekboers clashed with the Xhosa eight times along the Great Kei River, and just about everywhere in a guerrilla conflict with the British. Later the area became a wellspring of resistance heroes including Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo.Xhosa culture dominates the former apartheid ‘homelands’ of Transkei (the Wild Coast) and Ciskei, nominally independent republics that were used as dumping grounds for ‘undesirables’. Today these regions celebrate their heritage with institutions such as the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha. If you prefer the less complicated culture of animals, the province has excellent wildlife parks offering a viable safari alternative to parks such as the Kruger