One finds the world's strangest and most dramatic landscapes, a unique wealth of animal and plant life, a treasure of gold, diamonds and other minerals, and a kaleidoscope of fascinating culture in South Africa.

Nature's tools of creation, the wind, sun, ice and rain, have worked a special magic. There are extremes of deserts, savannas, snow-covered mountains, grasslands, high forests and tropical mangrove swamps. Within these climatic zones, Earth's most diverse plant populations flourish. South Africa is also the home of big game and hosts birds found in a vast range of habitats and containing a multitude of foods that nature has prepared for them.

It is the variety of South Africa's fascinating and diverse population that is its greatest asset. South Africa is often called the cradle of civilisation, for this is where archaeologists discovered 2,5 million-year-old fossils of our earliest ancestors, as well as 100 000-year-old remains of modern man.

Although South Africans come from many cultural traditions, they belong to one nation; a dynamic blend of age-old customs and modern ways, building a new South African society to create a better life for all.