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The rand, a card economy that reaches further than most of the continent, and the reason no exchange rate appears anywhere on this page.

South Africa is a high country with a real winter and a southern hemisphere calendar, and most packing mistakes here start from forgetting one of those.

Minibus taxis move most of South Africa, ride hailing covers the cities, and the distances between them are longer than the map suggests.

South Africa has a high crime rate and a very large number of visitors who have no trouble at all. Both are true, and the difference is mostly habits.

A cuisine built from Cape Malay cooking, Indian indenture, Portuguese trade routes and the fire everybody in the country gathers around.

Twelve official languages, a country that talks openly about its own history, and a set of courtesies that are easy to learn and matter more than usual.

A carnival on the second of January, an arts festival that takes over a whole town, and public holidays that are commemorations before they are days off.

South Africa's diaspora story runs in two directions at once: people removed from their own neighborhoods, and a solidarity movement that circled the world.

South Africa has some of the best accessible infrastructure on the continent and very little consistency, so the research is per venue rather than general.

One of the oldest Islamic cities in the world, founded in the tenth century and at its height in the fourteenth, inside a city of twenty million.

The capital of Egypt at its height, split across a river: temples for the living on the east bank, tombs for the dead on the west.

The World Heritage property at Aswan is ten places, not two temples. Five were cut apart and moved before the reservoir reached them, and five never left.

Egypt has one decisive variable and it is heat. Everything else about when to come follows from how much of it you are willing to stand.

Egypt, unlike much of the continent, will sell most visitors a visa at the airport. Whether you should let it is the more useful question.