h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi folks, just some general South Africa stuff. My country when seen on a map of Africa looks rather small, but that's because Africa is so big! South Africa is about 1,2 million square kilometres in size, almost twice as big as Texas. We also have about twice the population of Texas, at over 50 million. South Africa is the 25th most populous country in the world.

Most of our people are crammed into a few huge city regions: Pretoria, Johannesburg and the rest of the Gauteng Province, Durban, Cape Town, and a few others. In most of South Africa the cities and towns are many miles apart. But there are numerous villages and 'informal settlements'.

In my own part, Limpopo Province at the far north of the country, there is still a lot of wild land. There aren't even many 'conventional' farms. There are a lot of game farms though, but they look like wild land. The Orange Free State, however, is almost all farms, mostly corn/maize, sunflowers, wheat and sheep. The Free State is mostly a high and very flat plateau, but there are hills and mountains to the east.

The Drakensberg mountains form a barrier between the Free State and Kwazulu-Natal. They are very rugged, reaching a height of over 3400 m, although the highest peaks are in the landlocked country of Lesotho. In Natal they reach about 3300 m. Natal itself is a small province but very beautiful... unfortunately a very large amount of wild countryside has been destroyed for farming, sugarcane and pine plantations. The province also suffers from soil erosion as a result of all the disturbance of the natural vegetation.

South from Natal is the Eastern Cape. A lot of this region was in the past the country of Transkei, granted independence under Apartheid and traditionally not having been settled by white folks. It was a rather poor and undeveloped region - but extremely beautiful. I guess it still is. The parts of the Eastern Cape that were settled by whites are more 'developed' with cities, towns, farms and plantations.

The Northern Cape is the largest, most barren and forbidding province in South Africa, and the one with the smallest population. Almost the entirety of it is desert and semi-desert, mainly the Karroo, but with the Kalahari in the north. In this region you can drive for hours and hours without seeing a town or, often, any sign of humanity except the road itself!

The Northwest Province isn't very distinctive, it's much like Limpopo and a bit of Gauteng. Similarly with Mpumalanga, but it at least has spectacular scenery and many wildlife reserves.

The Western Cape is the southwesternmost province of South Africa, and the one with the most distinctive vegetation. Some of it is the semi-desert succulent Karroo, which is an extremely diverse miniature succulent shrubland. The rest is the vegetation type known as Fynbos, a fine-leaved shrubland of woody plants that don't grow tall but exhibit amazing diversity. There are vast numbers of very beautifully flowering species. The region also has many rugged and spectacular mountains, these constituting the Cape Fold region where the earth's crust has been folded and buckled into amazing formations. The non-mountainous parts of the Western Cape, due to the long period of settlement by whites, have mostly been converted into farms - grapes, wheat and fruit mostly.

OK I hope some of you found this quick overview of South Africa interesting and now have an idea what this country is about!

It is amazing.