Here’s the best piece of advice you can get from a local: if you really want to get under the skin of Cape Town, you have to slow things down. If you speed through the city, you will miss out on the great subtleties that give Cape Town its character. It’ll melt together and become a blur, as if you are driving a car at 100 miles per hour and trying to look out the window.

Natalie Tenzer-Silvia and her team at Dana Tours are the new whl.travel local partner in Mozambique. Tellingly, as they have been around since 2002, they are no strangers to the community development that is such an important part of Mozambique’s growth today. In addition to organising Mozambique tours and running their own Mozambique transport company, Dana Tours is actively involved in hosting volunteers.

East of Cape Town in South Africa, the Cape Winelands region encompasses a mountain chain, nearly 7,000 species of endemic plant life, hundreds of wine vineyards and over a quarter of a million people. No single feature of the Cape Winelands stands on its own. Rather, they form a complex web of connections: the gorgeous nature is related to the local agriculture, which is in turn connected to a history of colonisation and cultural development that continues to affect social and environmental issues today.

A herd of elephants stomped across the wide-open plain while a family of giraffes craned their necks for a mid-day snack. As I stared out the window onto the lush green plain, it hit me: This is Africa! My first wildlife sighting in Botswana came before I had even touched down in the Okavango Delta. I took the elephants and giraffes grazing below our Cessna as a sign of things to come.