Geography

The Witwatersrand National Botanical Garden outside Johannesburg has been renamed the Walter Sisulu National Botanical Garden, in honour of the freedom fighter who was also "the father of everyone" with whom he spent a quarter of a century behind apartheid's prison bars.

No trip to Soweto in Johannesburg is complete without a visit to Regina Mundi. Soweto's largest Catholic Church played a pivotal role in the township's history of resistance against apartheid. Now the church opens its doors to streams of visitors keen to witness the scars it still bears.

Cape Town has its low, flat, Table Mountain. Johannesburg has the long, thin, Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest towers in Africa. It's a tribute to the tower's symbolic power that it has been incorporated into the city's official logo.

Lesedi Cultural Village, less than an hour's drive from Johannesburg, gives visitors a chance to share in the magic and traditions of the people of South Africa.

South Africa set itself the target of increasing land under formal conservation from 5.4% in 1994 to 8% by 2010. The country is well on track, with close on 400 000 hectares having been added, and plans to designate a further 121 000 hectares - in what would be the single largest proclamation of land for the country's national parks since 1931.

Cape Town is to install signs on Simonstown's Main Road warning motorists of feathered pedestrians on walkabout from Boulders Beach, the only national park land in the country that is located in the middle of a city.

They're strong, beautiful and breathtaking to watch. They're the Lipizzaner horses, brought to South Africa by Count Jankovich-Besan in 1944, and Johannesburg is the only place outside Austria where you can see them.

If an object the size of half a soccer field hit the earth at 4 000 kilometres per hour hundreds of thousands of years ago, what would you expect to find?