KWAZULU NATAL REGION

The province, historic home to the Zulu nation, stretches along 600 kilometres of balmy Indian Ocean coastline from the Transkei region in the south to the Mozambique border in the north.

Its principal urban centre is Durban, a city that grew up around one of the southern hemisphere's finest natural harbours and which, today, ranks as a major industrial and commercial centre and the country's foremost trading outlet.

• Durban is also a premier vacation playground,
• a fun-in-the-sun place popular for its seductive climate,
• its warm blue waters and broad sands (the Golden Mile sprawls along six kilometres of bustling seafront),
• for the subtropical luxuriance of its gardens and parks,
• for its hotels, restaurants and entertainment complexes - and
• for the wonderfully exotic world created by the city's large Indian community.

The seaboard either side of Durban is even more of a beach-lovers' paradise.

South of the metropolis are the Sunshine and Hibiscus Coasts, well-named expanses of shoreline studded with a score and more small, lagoon-girded, sunlit resort towns and villages - Scottburgh, Port Shepstone, Margate, Ramsgate and Port Edward are the most prominent - that draw holidaymakers in their tens of thousands.

To the north of Durban is the Dolphin Coast, a quieter stretch graced by tropical lala palms, hibiscus and bougainvillea and much favoured by scuba-divers and deep-sea game fishermen.

Although Durban is by far the largest of KwaZulu-Natal's centres it is not the provincial capital. That status belongs (somewhat tenuously: its claim is disputed by Ulundi) to Pietermaritzburg, an attractive, somewhat Victorian city set high in the green hills about 90 kilometres inland.

From here, visitors travel north through the scenically pleasant midlands into Zululand, a historic territory whose rolling hills and misty valleys once hosted the great Shaka's marauding regiments, and which later served as a vast and bloody battleground in the wars between Zulu, Voortrekker, Boer and Briton. Much of this fascinating heritage - cultural and military - is preserved and can be explored.

Farther to the north, you'll find some of Africa's finest Game and Nature Reserves.

• The region, known as Maputaland, is warm, well-watered, lush, and it provides ideal habitats for a quite remarkable number and variety of animals.
• The wildlife can be seen at its most prolific in the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park, but other protected areas are just as notable in their own way -
• Ndumo for the richness of its floodplain,
• Itala for its rugged splendour,
• Tembe for its elephants,
• Sibaya and Kosi Bay for their tropical lakes,
• the huge Greater St Lucia Wetlands Park for its extraordinary diversity, a mix of lake, lagoon, river, swampland, savanna, marine reserve and offshore coral reef.

Running 300 kilometres along KwaZulu-Natal's western border is a massive, often snow-capped rampart known as the Drakensberg ('dragon's mountain'), some of whose precipitous faces plunge down, almost sheer, for more than 2000 metres to the uplands and coastal plain below. The mountains are a spectacular fantasia of cliff, jagged peak and deep ravine sculpted over the millennia by rain, river and wind, and their beauty and grandeur in all seasons is unparalleled anywhere in the country.

Amansimtoti
Balito
KZN Battlefields
Dundee
Durban
Durban Cont.
KZN East Griqualand
Escourt
Howick
Kosi Bay
Ladysmith
Mputaland
Port Edward
Richards Bay
Sodwana Bay
St Lucia
Zululand Routes