Africa travel guide

A remote and expansive slice of East Africa, Tanzania's Selous is larger than Switzerland, dwarfing its Serengeti counterpart yet receiving far fewer visitors. Animals far outnumber tourists here and the reserve’s geographical location means both Southern and Eastern African game roam its grasslands, lured to the peaceful waters of its rivers and lakes where elephants and hippos bathe.

With 99 mosques and shrines, which represent the 99 names of Allah known to man, Harar is sometimes called Islam’s fourth holiest city. A walled citadel, covering just one square kilometre, it is crammed with labyrinthine streets ending at colourful mosques, elegant Islamic architecture and ancient markets.

You don’t instantly pair Africa’s vast terrains with two wheels, but Morocco’s combination of mountains and desert dirt roads make it a playground for mountain bikers and thanks to a better network and tarmacking, road cycling there is on the up. Cycling safaris are now a thing in Kenya too, increasing the chances of an up-close wildlife experience and covering more ground than you can on two feet.

A series of five “museums” across Namibia, these fantastic culture centers are where indigenous San, Mafwe, Kavango and Damara communities recreate traditional villages. You can learn how to hunt, fish, dance and weave with the locals using age-old methods, plus the tours and lessons contribute to local incomes and community projects, so your money is reinvested wisely.

Originating in the highlands of Angola and shaped over thousands of years, the Okavango Delta is a waterhole of epic proportions that floods life into Botswana. Flowing through sands, swamps and forested islands, the Delta is a lifeline for huge herds of elephant, plus 121 other mammals including lions, antelope, buffalo. Over 440 species of bird also flock there to fish, nest and breed.

Known for one of wildlife’s greatest annual spectacles and named for the indigenous Maasai tribes, Kenya’s Mara stages the most nail-biting section of the Great Migration from Jun-Oct, when some two million wildebeest and zebra each attempt to survive the risky crossing over the crocodile-packed Mara river. The surrounding Maasai conservancies are on Maasai-owned land, and guides can take you on fascinating walking safaris in the bush.

A gorilla permit in Uganda or Rwanda will grant you a one-hour audience to sit with the most powerful of the great apes. It seems short – and experiences are pricy– but during this hour you’re able to get very close to this fascinating creature, an experience that will leave you with a profound understanding of what it means to be a part of the primate family.

Whether it’s through hiring a local guide – the people with the most accurate and enthusiastic knowledge about their country; staying at a Maasai-owned camp in Kenya; sampling street food in South Africa; or learning the history and taboos of ‘fady’ in Madagascar, getting under the skin of African culture doesn’t just mean taking a tour; the options are as endless as they are enriching.

A particularly nasty hunting practice, canned hunting is a prevalent problem in South Africa. Organisers breed lions to be sold on to canned hunting farms – tourist facilities where the rich can come in, shoot themselves a lion, and keep the pelt and an offensive picture as a souvenir. The lions are hand-raised, and never learn to fear humans – they don’t stand a chance. It’s expensive, distasteful and disgusting.

As tempting as it may sound to choose your feather count from a comfort menu, by staying in a super luxury lodge in Africa (we’re talking gold taps and grand pianos…), all you’re doing is cutting yourself off from what is really special about your surroundings. You’ll have a far more memorable experience if you swap your flatscreen TV for a spectacular sweeping view across the open wilderness.

There’s no denying Nosy Be is a beautiful tropical island – it’s widely considered the ‘capital’ of Madagascan vacations, but its jumble of all-inclusive resorts, expensive yacht trips and flashy restaurants have little or no local identity. Step away from your sun lounger and branch out and you’ll get to know the landscapes, cuisine and local culture that make this country so enriched.

Off-the-beaten-track Tunisia can be staggeringly beautiful and its reinvented dars and vibrant souks are pretty cool too. However, so much of Tunisia is packed with all-inclusive resorts that many people going wouldn’t know a Berber village or an ancient medina if it jumped up and bit them – the resort beaches are a sea of plastic loungers so thick you can barely lay a beach towel. Not fun.

Africa is a place of huge linguistic diversity – there are an estimated 2,000 languages spoken across the continent, which are divided into four large language families: Afroasiatic, which spreads throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa; Niger-Congo, which is spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa; Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan – the latter southern African languages are distinctive for incorporating click consonants.

Around 100 of Africa’s languages are used for inter-ethnic communication and include Arabic, Berber and Swahili. There are more than 90 million French speakers in Africa, 100 million Swahili speakers and 170 million Arabic speakers;

English takes pole position with over 700 million speakers.