Table of contents for April 2024 in Getaway

As a young child, I never really dreamed of travelling overseas. All my adventures were in and around Cape Town and the Western Cape, and to me, every trip was simply magical -even the one where I cut my knee after not watching where I was walking and I needed stitches. Absolutely nothing came close to our family weekends away. While practically on our doorstep, every destination felt like a million miles away at the time. The days were spent running around with my cousins, late-night braais and plenty of swimming. I grew up with a dad and close family friends involved in karate and attended gasshuku (karate camp) from when I was in nappies. Finally donning a karataegi of my own, I went from being one of the resident…

WHERE ON EARTH? ON FLY RANCH IN NORTHERN NEVADA, THE FLY GEYSER IS A 'WHIMISICALLY COLOURED AND FANTASTICALLY SHAPED DESERT MARVEL'. MEASURING APPROXIMATELY 1,5 M HIGH AND 3.7 M WIDE, THE GEOTHERMAL GEYSER, MADE UP OF THREE MOUNDS, WAS ACCIDENTALLY CREATED BY A GEOTHERMAL POWER COMPANY IN 1964 WHO HAD DRILLED A TEST WELL THAT THEY INCORRECTLY PLUGGED. THE MOUNDS CONTAIN QUARTZ, WHICH ARE GROWING AS RAPIDLY AS THE GEYSER. Hot Stuff The three mounds that make up the Fly Ranch geothermal geyser protrude from a field of tall reeds on privately owned land in Washoe County, Nevada.…

About 127 km south-west of Durban and 20 km south-west of Port Shepstone lies Margate, a coastal resort town in KwaZulu-Natal. Named by an English surveyor in 1908 after the British seaside resort in county Kent by the same name, the South African Margate boasts much better weather than its British namesake. Visitors to this section of the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast - named the Hibiscus Coast - are spoilt for choice with wonderful, sunny beach towns. Margate is yet another that will delight you with its many offerings. It’s a vibrant, colourful area famous for its nightlife and beaches. This area has something for everyone, including water sports such as canoeing, boardsailing, boating, skiing and scuba diving. If it’s the beach life you're after - and why head here if…

Bresser offers a range of astronomy telescopes, from beginner-friendly refractor telescopes, such as the Sirius 70/900 AZ Refractor Telescope - 70 mm (R3 799 inc. vat) and the Taurus 90/900 MPM Refractor Telescope - 90 mm telescopes (R7 799 inc. vat). For Intermediate reflector telescopes, they recommend the Spica 130/1000 EQ3 Telescope (R8 699 inc. vat) and for more advanced telescopes, the Space Explorer MC 90/1250 Automatic telescope (R14 299) and the Messier MCX127 GOTO telescope AZ/EQ (R23 599). All prices are suggested retail prices as of April 2024 and are subject to change. All Bresser telescopes come with a complete kit to start your stargazing journey. With their long focal length and aperture lens, viewing the sun, moon, planets, open star clusters and searching for celestial bodies is an…

Maegan-Leigh Jacobs PARADISE FOUND (P 96) Born and bred in Cape Town, Maegan-Leigh embodies the spirit of coastal living with her love for walks on the beach and basking in the sunshine. Having recently caught the travel bug, she set out on two island getaways within a few weeks, solidifying her belief that island life resonates with her essence. She is always up for a hiking or swimming adventure, which rank high among her favourite activities to connect with nature. She also loves visiting new restaurants to try and tick off her bucket list of must-try cuisines. Richard Brown CAMPFIRE CHRONICLES (P 82) A wanderer at heart, Richard found his love for adventure sparked during childhood camping escapades and epic journeys across Africa with his family. With a knack for…

‘Platt’ means different things depending on your age. If you’ve just finished Matric, it probably means freedom, rage and parties, and doing the sorts of things that teenagers - who have been worrying about their exams for the last few months but are now free from that stress - do. If you’re a bit more advanced from those teenage years - that was subtle, right? - it probably also means a place to escape, but perhaps differently, getting away to the Garden Route to enjoy the sights and sounds of nature … the sea, the views, the markets, the wildlife. Well, whatever your age, there’s plenty to see and do in Plettenberg Bay. Originally named Bahia Formosa (Beautiful Bay) by early Portugese explorers, Plettenberg Bay sits on the Garden Route…

In 1969, the world changed. Hello Woodstock, three days of music and peace, and mud that has never seen its equal. It didn’t take place in the town of Woodstock but in the nearby town of Bethel, despite its name. Today, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts manages the space, where people still gather for the music - on the roster this year is Hootie & the Blowfish, Limp Bizkit and for the Woodstock generation, Santana and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among plenty of others. But for the first time, there will be camping. Yes, from May to October, you can pull in and stay for the night, this time with ablutions and facilities, and no mud. But you can probably roll around on the grass if you want. There are…

FAST FACTS Who Mikey Schaefer Aclimberwho has done first ascents on the tallest walls in Patagonia Hazal Findlay A British climber with a lot of big wall and sea-cliff experience Dr Heïdi Sevastra, A glaciologist who works for the Arctic Monitoring Association Adam Kjaldsen A Greenlandic Guide Aldo Kane A renowned Adventurer How Using a special radar to take real-time depth and density measurements of a rarely studied section of Greenland's ice cap. Initial findings The fjord extending far inland in Eastern Greenland is experiencing an increase in temperature, aligning with the initial results from NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (QMG) project, which has launched more than 1 600 probes around Greenland that send daily readings via satellite and record thousands of measurements over their lifetime. Dr Sevestre was surprised by…

BRIEFS | The Thread FOLLOW US MEED MORE TRAVEL INSPO? getaway.co.za @GetawayMagazine I'd just finished high school when my boyfriend’s parents, the Hoskens, decided a long haul through Namibia was a fitting way to celebrate school being out forever. Before I met the Hoskens, I had ventured as far as a farmer’s market on Sundays for cultural (or horticultural) enlightenment. I’d moved from Johannesburg to Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal, with my mom and two sisters. It had been us girls against the world, but we hadn’t travelled much. If you don’t know, Hillcrest is (or was, I can’t quite decide) a dorpie between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. It’s developed a lot since its inception in the late 1800s, progressing from a thoroughfare for holidaymakers en route to more exciting seaside locations to a…

DIE WYN EN WILDSFEES 6-7 April SANDRINGHAM FARM, STELLENBOSCH This event embraces our responsibility to safeguard our resources - soil, water, forests, minerals and irreplaceable wildlife - and forges a harmonious connection between humanity and wildlife. There will be entertainment, live music, a braai, wine tasting, safari tours and a children's zone. Tickets: from R150 webtickets.co.za MUDDY PRINCESS 7 April RIETVLEI ZOO FARM, JOHANNESBURG Are you planning your next adventurous girls' day? Don your pink tutus and run, walk, climb and balance on this 5 km muddy obstacle course. The event is open to princesses as young as six, of all sizes and fitness levels and promises fun, falling and laughter. Tickets: from R299 webtickets.co.za UMHLANGA SUNRISE WALK 20 April DURBAN VIEW PARKING, MARINE DRIVE, UMHLANGA This easy sunrise walk…

Around midnight on a Thursday in June last year, a fire started at Green Safari’s Ila Safari Lodge in Kafue National Park, Zambia. By sunrise the entire boma area (reception, dining, bar and pool) was gone. Fortunately, the guest rooms remained intact, the guests were unharmed and the blaze didn't spread to the surrounding national park. Green Safaris is passiontate about preserving some of the most pristine wildlife areas in Africa, and its goal is to leave the areas where it operates as untouched as possible. It all started with Ila Lodge in 2016. The Ila boma, on the banks above the Kafue River, was the first big thing Green Safaris built. Its distinctive semi-circular structure was constructed using a pioneering sandbag eco-building technique. Also at the core of Green…

HIGH AND FAST In years gone by, you could hop on a Concorde in NYC and be in London in time for brunch. A three-hour trip. Bliss. Like Woodstock, the first flight was also in 1969. But the noise (sonic boom, anyone?) and the fuel bill were heavy - 2 179 km/h will do that. And 26 November 2003 was its swansong. But supersonic flight Mark II may be just a test flight away. Two aviation projects are working to overcome those trifles: Boom Supersonic and a partnership between NASA and Lockheed Martin will both launch test flights of their innovative aircraft for the first time later this year. The rules are still the same: no flying faster than the speed of sound over land. NASA and Lockheed Martin are…

Show Me The Place BY HEDLEY TWIDLE Jonathan Ball, R295 A man, a desire to see the world and a need to write it all down. This is not your average travel book; instead, we are invited along on the adventure. It’s a book of stories of faraway places that we ache to visit. In the bothies (stone cottages) on the beach, we’re alongside the author - he’s cycling through Scotland's islands - and play with Steve and Rafa, who are 'trying to subvert the capitalist economy’ by doing as little as possible: ‘We invented pastimes. You balanced an egg-shaped beach pebble on a boulder, then threw other pebbles until it fell… Steve and I played Egg on Coast for hours.’ We are in the cold water of Muizenberg Beach…

TRAVEL | Sri Lanka It’s pouring with rain, and the four of us, sharing two umbrellas, are standing between two gigantic lion’s paws. Like a scene straight out of Lord of The Rings, the pair of monumental paws form what was once the base of a whole lion, created from as many as three million stones and bricks and stretching to the top of the sheer-sided, massive monolith of red rock that looms 200 m above us. Sigiriya, Lion Rock, the Castle in the Sky, call it what you will, this ancient fortress, perched on the top of a rock that juts dramatically over the forests of central Sri Lanka, must once have been truly awe-inspiring. But that was probably the point: a warning to potential intruders. The origin of…