South Africa Has My Heart ❤️

The drive to the airport felt different this time. No one beside me double-checking the passport was in the bag, no one to split the parking fee with, and — crucially — no one to blame if I’d forgotten something. Just me, a boarding pass for a fourteen-hour flight, and the particular quiet that comes before doing something entirely on your own. Fourteen hours is roughly the length of time it takes to watch three films, eat two meals you didn’t really want, and fully interrogate every decision that led you to book a middle seat. Solo travel has a way of turning ordinary logistics into small acts of courage. Checking in alone. Finding the gate alone. Watching the world curve away beneath the plane, alone, and feeling strangely proud of it — mostly because nobody was around to see me get lost on the way to the gate.

Still, it gave the trip a kind of runway — space to shed the routines of home and arrive somewhere new with an open mind, if not a functioning back. And South Africa didn’t wait long to fill that space. Waiting on the other end was a colleague, Rez, who’d offered something rare to someone travelling alone: a place to stay, a family to be folded into, a home rather than just a hotel room. Johannesburg stopped being a pin on a map and became a place with a door that opened when I knocked, which, after fourteen hours in economy, is roughly the greatest sentence in the English language.

That first night delivered its own welcome, in the form of a crash course in South African life: load shedding. The lights simply went out — no storm, no warning, no dramatic countdown, just the scheduled dark that so many households there live around and I, jet-lagged and smug in my new surroundings, had absolutely no idea existed. There I was, groping around a stranger’s — well, a colleague’s — house by phone-torch, discovering that “settling in” and “power cut” can arrive in the same ten minutes. Sitting in it, I remember thinking how quickly a place can teach you something about itself before you’ve even unpacked. It wasn’t inconvenience so much as introduction — a reminder that I was a guest in someone else’s ordinary, not just a tourist passing through the highlight reel, though I’ll admit the highlight reel doesn’t usually involve candles.

The highlight reel came soon enough. Day one was Pilanesberg, a full day given over to the bush — the particular hush of a safari vehicle idling while everyone strains to see what’s moving in the grass, usually a bird, occasionally an actual elephant, and once, memorably, just a bush that three people were convinced was moving. The sun did its slow arc overhead, and the whole day gave me a newly humbling sense of scale — turns out you can spend twenty minutes feeling very small in front of a rhino and come away oddly grateful for it. And then, in one of those contrasts only travel produces, that same day ended in a five-star hotel — crisp sheets and quiet luxury bookending a day spent covered in dust, sunscreen, and the faint smell of “I definitely got too close to that giraffe.”

Day two brought a gentler rhythm: back to Rez’s home, and an entire day doing nothing but sunbathing. After the intensity of the safari, that stillness mattered. Solo travel isn’t only about ticking off sights — some of the best days are the ones spent simply existing somewhere new, letting the trip breathe.

Then came the solo leg proper. Days three through six took me to Cape Town alone — another five-star hotel, another skyline to learn from scratch. A tour bus wound through the city while the sun did what South African sun does to a British complexion with zero prior training in “sun”: a sunburn so committed it practically had its own itinerary by evening. Meals were eaten alone at restaurant tables, which is its own quiet skill — learning to enjoy your own company in public, menu in hand, doing that thing where you check your phone with great purpose so the waiter doesn’t pity you, without needing anyone else’s conversation to make the meal complete.

One moment from Cape Town has stayed with me more than the views: two young women stopped and asked if I’d take their photo. A small, throwaway request, the kind that happens a hundred times a day in tourist cities — but I liked handing the phone back and imagining where that photo ended up. Maybe it really is stuck to a fridge somewhere, a tiny, permanent trace of a stranger’s holiday that I had nothing to do with except pressing a button at the right second. Solo travel is full of these fleeting, one-way connections — brief, warm, and then gone.

Not every encounter was so gentle. An Uber mix-up saw the app book two cars instead of one, and what followed was a doomed, entirely one-sided argument with a driver who hadn’t caused the problem any more than I had, conducted largely through the international language of pointing at a phone screen. In the end, the sensible move won out over the principled one: paying the £3 for a trip that never happened and letting it go, muttering under my breath in a manner I like to think was dignified. It’s a small, almost forgettable moment, but it’s the kind of thing solo travel teaches you fastest — sometimes the cheapest resolution is simply not to fight it, and sometimes justice costs exactly three pounds.

By day seven I was back in Johannesburg, and the trip folded itself neatly back to where it started: dinner with Rez and her family, the kind of warm, noisy, generous evening that turns a work colleague into something closer to family, and a much-needed reminder that not every meal that week had been eaten in solitary negotiation with a menu.

The last morning was spent at the zoo before the long trip home — a gentle, almost domestic close to a trip that had ranged from the wild openness of Pilanesberg to the sociable chaos of Cape Town’s streets, and which meant I saw more wildlife behind bars on day eight than I had roaming free on day one, which feels like it should be a metaphor for something. Eight days, one flight there and one flight back, and in between: darkness and five-star beds, sunburn and stillness, strangers and family, elephants and Ubers. Travelling alone doesn’t mean travelling without connection, or without incident — if anything, it sharpens both, making every kindness, every small exchange, every argument over a phantom taxi feel a little more vivid, because there was no one else there to share the noticing, or the blame, with. Just me, a questionable relationship with sun cream, and South Africa, working it out together.