Wonder, jeopardy, lots of champagne — my rail adventure across Africa

Times

3 days ago

Every safari has its epiphany. Without warning the beauty, the fragility and the technical perfection of the living machine that is the African bush pulls into sharp focus, and suddenly your brain seems too small to process the wonder. The trigger can as easily be a dung beetle as a pride of lions posing on a rock. For me, it was a tree, a bird and a grumpy herbivore.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This is the first of three dispatches from one of the world's most epic journeys: a 3,450-mile trip from Cape Town in South Africa to the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, via Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, aboard the private train operator Rovos Rail's Pride of Africa.
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Such is the trip's popularity that it's officially sold out until 2027, but the tour operator Distant Journeys still has space on at least one of the five 2026 departures.
It's an expedition on which up to 72 high-maintenance, luxury-loving tourists will be dodging elephants, railway robbery, attempted extortion and a riot on a 15-day itinerary that promises gold, diamonds, great wonders and troubling inequity. It all begins on a wet Friday afternoon in the waiting room at Cape Town railway station.
My fellow passengers are mostly retired couples. With the awkwardness of strangers on a train we sip blanc de blancs and make small talk before we are escorted, carriage by carriage, to our compartments. Mine has more panelling than the Churchill War Rooms, a fridge full of wine, a bed beneath a 4ft window, a bathroom, a desk and a hostess on standby.
We pull out of Cape Town at 4.15pm. A homeless couple wrapped in blankets wave from behind a chain-link fence on the wrong side of the tracks. It occurs to me that it will be the first of many encounters between the dirt poor and the filthy rich.
The Pride of Africa is a monster. One third of a mile long and hauled by four engines — two electric and two diesel — it's made up of 21 passenger cars bought from National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) and refurbished in the company yards in Pretoria.
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On board there's a compartment kept spare in case of marital breakdown and a larder containing 850lb of cheese, 1.3 tonnes of meat, 13,320 eggs and 3,848 bottles of wine. We're going to need the last, because Africa's tracks do not run smooth.
Indeed, South Africa's rail network, once one of the biggest on earth, is now barely functional. And when the train manager, Lawrence Zulu, outlines the trip he does so less like a happy-clappy tour leader and more like a doubt-stricken priest, ending the briefing with a heavenwards gaze and a plaintive, 'Well, that is the theory.'
Dinner is in the diner, and nothing could be finer than seeing American, Australian, Brazilian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian and South African interpretations of the formal dress ruling. Yellow bow ties, tuxedos, comedy blazers and even a naval uniform are on parade as we sit for duck confit on sweet potato wedges with braised red cabbage and an orange reduction.
As the wine flows, no one seems worried if we make it to Dar or not. The jeopardy, it seems, only enhances the adventure.
After a day and a night rattling northeast from Cape Town across the bitterly cold semi-desert of the Great Karoo, the passage enlivened by lectures from the onboard historian Nicholas Schofield and unlimited cocktails, we roll into Kimberley (685 miles).
It was here in 1871 that a cook called Esau Damoense discovered diamonds on a hill called the Colesberg Kopje. Within months hundreds of prospectors had hacked the hill flat, and when there was no hill left they started digging down.
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Few realised then that the Big Hole, as it became known, was being dug at the top of a Kimberlite pipe, a vertical tube of cooled magma that acts as a geological elevator bringing diamonds from 100 miles down.
Damoense, whose descendants live in near poverty just north of Kimberley, got a house and patch of land for his grave from the discovery. The de Beers brothers, who owned the Colesburg Kopje, made just £6,600, which would be £975,000 today.
The Bishop's Stortford boy Cecil Rhodes, on the other hand, did rather better. He used Rothschild money to buy up Kimberley claims and, perhaps adding insult to injury, named his diamond empire De Beers.
By the time the Big Hole was abandoned in 1914, it was deeper than One Canada Square at Canary Wharf is high. Now flooded, its blue waters are a tourist attraction upon which to ponder the irresistible attraction of a stone marketed not as a symbol of wealth or of power, but of love.
That night the train runs into a crime scene. Thieves have stolen the overhead cables, the power has been cut and the train is entangled just past Klerksdorp (888 miles) like a caterpillar in a copper web. Zulu is calmly resolving the issue, unaware that his day will only get worse.
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With the track impassable, passengers board coaches for the three-hour journey to Pretoria for lunch and a tour of the Rovos yards. It's a long way to go for a trainspotters' buffet, but the silver lining is that we cross the gold fields of the Witwatersrand.
Here, in a reef 220 miles long by 95 wide and 2 deep, lie the world's largest gold reserves. Rather than nuggets, the treasure comes in microscopic specks trapped in the sediment of a three billion-year-old and long-vanished inland sea.
That sediment is dug out from as far as 2.5 miles down, pulverised and soaked in cyanide to release the gold at a rate of five grams per tonne. Diamonds may speak the language of love, but there's no romance in gold.
Later we wait for the train at an abandoned station in Randfontein, just west of Soweto. It's dark by the time the engines roll in, but Zulu's face is darker. Not only has he had to cut the train free from sabotaged cables but he's also been through a riot by Klerksdorp residents furious over an eight-day power cut.
They've dodged stone-throwers and barricades and yet his uniformed staff greet their guests with warm smiles and chilled champagne.
Tomorrow we'll disembark in Zeerust (1,047 miles) and transfer to the Madikwe Game Reserve for two nights on safari at the Tau Game Lodge. There's a waterhole out front where elephants, waterbucks, wildebeests and a lion come to drink, and on the first evening, on a plain turned to gold by the setting sun, a blue sourplum bush, a crimson-breasted shrike and a white rhino will trigger my safari epiphany.
But I think I mentioned that already.Chris Haslam was a guest of Distant Journeys, which has 20 nights — 16 all-inclusive on the train and four B&B in hotels — from £12,995pp on the Grand African Rail Journey, including flights (distantjourneys.co.uk)