Ten days in South Africa: the first trip everybody takes, plus the city they all skip

A quarter of steep cobbled lanes and single-storey houses painted in flat, saturated colour, with the oldest mosque in the country partway up the hill. People live here, so keep to the pavement with a camera and spend something in the shops.

A low ridge off the shoulder of the mountain with a road running to the top of it. Come an hour before the sun goes and you will find half the city already parked along the verge with the boot open.

One of the oldest restaurants in the quarter, serving Cape Malay food since the 1960s: bobotie, curries, samoosas, koeksisters. No alcohol, which nobody minds and everybody should be told before booking.

A flat sandstone plateau about 1,085 m at its highest, reached by a cable car whose floor turns through a full rotation on the way up. It is fifteen degrees colder and twice as windy at the top as at the car park, in any month.

Founded in 1913 on the mountain's eastern slope: proteas, a cycad amphitheatre, a stretch of fynbos and a curving steel walkway through the tree canopy. Two hours, and save the walkway for the low afternoon light.

A long-running restaurant on the edge of the centre doing a fixed spread of a dozen or more dishes from across the continent, brought out until you stop. Loud, communal and much better than the format suggests.

A cove of granite boulders where African penguins have nested since 1982. Boardwalks keep you off the sand and a couple of metres from the birds, which are loud, smell strongly and could not care less about you.

On the water in the naval town just north of the penguins, big enough to seat you without booking and unbothered by sandy feet. Fish and chips, frigates in the harbour, and the long drive south still to come.

The rocky headland at the southwestern tip of Africa, with the sign everybody queues to photograph. It is not the southernmost point of the continent, which is 150 km east, and the two oceans do not meet here. The walk down to the beach is still worth half an hour.

Two kilometres east of the headland, a high cliff with an 1859 lighthouse on top that was built so far up it spent half the year inside cloud. A funicular runs to it, or fifteen minutes on foot. Baboons work the car park and will open an unlocked door.

Seven kilometres offshore, a prison from the seventeenth century and a maximum security jail for opponents of apartheid until 1991, a World Heritage Site since 1999. Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years on it. The best part of four hours door to door, and no shade anywhere.

In the mall on the waterfront and a great deal better than that suggests: line-caught fish, oysters and sushi at prices that would embarrass a European restaurant of the same standard.

A working harbour that became the city's eating and shopping district in the 1990s, named for Queen Victoria and her second son. Seals on the pontoons, a swing bridge that stops for every yacht, and the ferry terminal for the island at the far end.

A former Methodist church on the edge of the empty ground it remembers. Some 60,000 people were cleared out of this quarter after 1966 and the houses knocked flat. The exhibition is built around a floor-sized street plan that returning residents write their old addresses onto.

The most articulate building in South Africa. Number Four, the section for black male prisoners, has been left as it was found. The courtroom above it is open to the public and its doors carry the twenty seven rights of the Bill of Rights carved into the wood.

A modernist box at the foot of the university holding one of the finest collections of classical African art anywhere, shown as art rather than ethnography. Free, quiet and forty five minutes.

A bar on this corner in some form since 1906, which makes it one of the oldest in the city. Pressed tin ceiling, cheap beer, a crowd from the university, and a nightclub after midnight if you last.

Two hundred metres from where he was shot, and built around one photograph without ever being only about it. The Bantu Education Act, the decision to teach in Afrikaans, and the morning it came apart. An hour and a half.

The four-room house on Vilakazi Street that Mandela moved into in 1946 and returned to briefly in 1990, with scorch marks from petrol bombs still on the outside wall. Small, plain and far more affecting than something larger would be.

The strip below the house is restaurants with terraces now, doing pap, chakalaka and grilled meat. Loud, cheerful and aimed at visitors, which on this particular street is entirely fine.

Your ticket is printed white or non-white at random and you go in through the matching gate, which sets the tone in four seconds. Inside is the whole arc from the mining compounds to the 1994 election, with newsreel, court transcripts and a room of 131 nooses. Three hours.

Stone foundations just inside the gate, all that is left of a trading store run by João Albasini, a Portuguese trader moving goods between the Boer republic and the coast. Ten minutes, and it usefully undoes any idea that this landscape was empty before it was a park.

The largest camp in the park, on a bend of the Sabie, with a shop, a fuel pump and a restaurant on a deck over the water. Get tomorrow's gate times at reception: they change every month.

The best hide in Kruger and five minutes from camp on a gravel spur. You walk down to a wooden platform on a small dam, unfenced, at eye level with hippo, crocodile, terrapins and half a dozen kinds of kingfisher. Sit still and stay longer than you planned.

A picnic site under enormous sycamore figs on the river road, with gas grills to hire, a kiosk and vervet monkeys who will take an unattended plate. Breakfast here is half the reason to leave camp at first light.

A small wheelchair accessible hide over a waterhole south of the eastern camp, whose name means where the buffalo drink. Quieter than the famous ones, and good for crocodile, terrapin and waders.

A small library and museum at camp holding the park's own written history: the wardens' diaries, archaeological finds and the arguments about what a national park was for. Cool, quiet, an hour, and exactly what the middle of the day needs.

A plaque on a granite hill reached by a gravel loop south of camp, marking where the park's first warden and his wife are commemorated. You cannot leave the car and you do not need to: the view north over the whole southern section is the point.

Two tablets, one English and one Afrikaans, set into a roadside boulder marking the proclamation of the reserve and the National Parks Act that made it Kruger. Five minutes, and one of the few places you are allowed out of the car.

The biggest picnic site in the park, under trees between two rivers, established as a ranger's post by the first warden. Grills to hire, toasted sandwiches, and a permanent traffic of people comparing sightings.

A cluster of boulders with a 1944 plaque recording the donation of seven farms to the park by Eileen Orpen, who bought them privately and gave them away. A small stop, and a reminder that a good deal of Kruger was assembled rather than proclaimed.

A nine hole course beside the water on the edge of camp, unfenced, with hippo in the dam and warthog on the fairway, and a clubhouse terrace anyone can sit on. Even if you never touch a club, it is a good half hour with coffee before you go.

The airstrip is fifteen minutes from camp and the international connection at Johannesburg needs three hours. Driving back to Johannesburg instead is five to six hours from the gate, so leave by mid morning.