South Africa Hotel

Places & Activities

Activities
Adventure Sports   |   General Sports   |   Shopping Trips and Rides and Trails   |   Water Activities   |   Wildlife Activities
Attractions
Cultural / Historic / Religious   |   Educational Entertainment Leisure   |   Nature Attractions

Educational

There is plenty of educational tours that the whole family can enjoy in South Africa. You are sure not going to regret having taken a tour of a South African harbour, observatory, aquarium or an educational theme park.

Harbours

South Africa boasts some of the world’s best and busiest ports and harbours. As one of the world’s few countries that enjoy access to two oceans (the Indian and Atlantic) - South African harbours are generally a beehive of activity.

Here is a list of the key South African harbours:

Richards Bay
Richards Bay is SA's premier bulk port and the country’s most modern harbour. Built in 1976 for the export of coal, it has since expanded into other bulk and break bulk cargoes.

In 2004 the port handled 85 million tonnes of cargo. A far cry from the unimpressed view expressed by Commissioner Henry Cloete in 1843, when he surveyed the Mhlatuze estuary and found it to have little or no potential as a future harbour.

The first recorded reference to the area was by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias who landed and erected a cross at Kwaaihoek on 12 March 1488.

He was followed by the first European to discover a sea route to India around Africa, Vasco da Gama - who passed Algoa Bay in 1497. For several hundred years afterwards the area was noted in navigation charts as a ‘landing place with fresh water’.

But it wasn’t until 1825 that Port Elizabeth earned a port status with the appointment of a harbour master and the customs collector the following year. By 1877 Port Elizabeth had developed into the principal port of South Africa with exports valued at the equivalent of R6 million.

Port of East London
The Port of East London is South Africa’s remaining river port. It is situated at the mouth of the Buffalo River in the Eastern Cape province. Its original name was Port Rex.

At Longitude 27º 55' E and Latitude 33º 1' S the general cargo port has good rail and road connections with the hinterland (Free State and Gauteng) and north and south to KZN and Port Elizabeth respectively.

The port boasts the largest export grain elevator in South Africa, which has recently been converted to handle imports in addition to exports.

Mossel Bay Harbour
This is a special place in our maritime history for it is the first recorded place used along the South African coast by European seafarers journeying to the East.

Mossel Bay Harbour is situated halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth at Longitude 22º 08' E and Latitude 34º 08' S and is the smallest of the commercial harbours along the South African coast.

One of the most famous landmarks at Mossel Bay is the Post Office Tree, where seafarers from centuries ago posted letters home using a cleft in an ancient tree as a postbox. This signifies that ships called at Mossel Bay regularly for watering and other purposes.

Today Mossel Bay is a quiet but active fishing harbour that has been thrown a lifeline with the emerging Mossgas oil industry, which began in the late 1980s.

Port of Saldanha
The Port of Saldanha Bay is South Africa’s largest natural anchorage and port with the deepest water at 60 nautical miles northwest of Cape Town.

The Dutch explorer Van Spilbergen visited Saldanha Bay in 1601, and only the lack of fresh water prevented this otherwise excellent natural harbour from becoming the major port along the south coast of Africa instead of Cape Town.

The port developed into a modern harbour only recently, enabling the export of iron ore from the Northern Cape.

The first deliveries of iron ore were exported on the Fern Sea during September 1976. Since then about 400 million tonnes of iron ore has been handled at the Saldanha Bulk Terminal.

Port Nolloth
Port Nolloth was established in the 1850's to facilitate the export of copper, which was brought to the coast along a 96-mile long narrow gauge railway from the mines near O'Kiep.

It continued to serve this purpose until well into the 20th century, but was never called on to handle any significant volume of cargo. The harbour's narrow, shallow entrance was tricky and eventually, with the improvement of the road systems, Cape Town became a more practical alternative.

In more recent years Port Nolloth has emerged as a centre of small-scale diamond recovery mining, while the town is the only holiday resort along the Diamond Coast.

Visitors can stroll down the pier at sunrise to watch diamond dredging boats and fishing trawlers pulling out of harbour. Alternatively, if lucky, they can view the regular Unicorn Lines coastal tanker Oranjemund making her measured way into the harbour (a ship jocularly referred to by her owners as ‘Portnollothmax’ in respect to her diminutive size).

Port of Nkqura
Situated at the mouth of Coega River and Algoa Bay, Port Nkqura (which is still under construction) will become South Africa’s 8th and latest commercial development

Libraries of South Africa

South Africans love their books. No wonder the country is known for producing such talented writers and academics as Nobel Prize Laureate JM Coetzee, Andre` Brink, Zakes Mda and Sol Plaatjie.

The country has more universities than most countries in Africa combined. In fact, students from most African countries have trekked down south to take advantage of the country’s excellent tertiary institutions and facilities, which include state of the art campus and public libraries.

There are public libraries in almost all the towns and major cities, which are loaded with everything from South African literature, research and reference materials to international history and political books.

• Among these libraries is the National Library of South African which came about as a result of the amalgamation of the Cape Town based South African Library and the State Library of the South African Republic of Pretoria in 1999.
  

• The Cape Town wing of the South African Library is the oldest library in the country and has its origins in the early 1800s.
  

• The Governor of the Cape Colony Lord Charles Somerset launched the South African Public Library with proceeds from the wine tax, which was one of the colony’s driving economic sectors. The library began to grow from then, relying heavily on donations from various prominent members of society including Sir George Grey.
  

• The State Library in Pretoria also followed an almost similar of growth, though it was established by the Dutch settlers who ruled over the Free State and Transvaal provinces, hence it was known as Die Staats-Bibliotheek der Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (State Library of the South African Republic).
  

• Today Pretoria is probably the mecca of libraries with its array of excellent libraries which include the National Library of South Africa, University of Pretoria's Academic Information Service, the Library Service of the University of South Africa (Unisa), Pretoria Community Library, and the libraries of the Tshwane University of Technology, Vista University and the Medical University of South Africa (Medunsa).
  

• The Rhodes University in Grahamstown, hailed as one of the best journalism training institutions in the country also boasts a state of the art library.
  

• South Africa also boasts an impressive online library called the Internet Public Library which covers anything from humanities, government, politics and media.
  

• Most of the South African libraries work hand-in-hand with publishing and print media houses to ensure a constant in-flow of new titles, newspapers and magazines.

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