We had a 2-week self-drive holiday in South Africa in July/August 2026, before Kate returned to the UK and I stayed on to join a safari photography trip. We began in the south-east of the country, flying from Johannesburg to Durban in KwaZulu-Natal province, with the intention of visiting an area of the country we had only touched the edges of on previous visits.
After a night on the coast just north of Durban airport in the pleasant recreational town of Ballito, our first longer stop was in one of Montusi Mountain Lodge’s bungalows, in the Drakensberg mountains. The area is dominated by Cathedral Peak in the dramatic Amphitheatre of dragons-tooth crags, and we enjoyed walks across the lodge’s veldt, with stupendous views (and the occasional zebra).
Cathedral Peak and part of the Amphitheatre in evening light, Drakensberg Mountains.
We had seen the magnificent shield-wall of peaks in the distance when we visited the battlefields area of the country in the mid twenty-teens (Spion Kop, Rorke’s Drift and iSandlwana) and had wanted to return to explore the Drakensberg ever since.
This is the southern hemisphere’s winter, of course, and once the sun had gone down it soon became chilly, and we woke one morning to a heavy frost on our lawn.
Bungalow, Montusi Mountain Lodge.
Despite the season we only had one afternoon of poor weather, and this was profitably spent in front of our bungalow’s TV cheering on the Lionesses while working our way through some excellent Hemel in Aarde wine!
There’s a lot of birdlife in the lodge grounds, including attractive Greater Double-collared Sunbirds feeding on the clumps of fading aloes. Once again, the low sun at this time of year allows some dramatically lit wildlife images.
The lodge has its own stables, and returning riders caught in the last of the evening sun made attractive, dusty tableaux, reminiscent of the American West.
