Family Holidays to South Africa with Teens

At Kwandwe Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape, game drives track the reserve's resident wildlife across open grassland and thicket, with guides who read the terrain for signs most guests would walk straight past. For teens who want to go further than watching, a session with a veterinary specialist on active rhino conservation work, from monitoring to hands-on fieldwork, gives them a real stake in what they're seeing, not just a photograph of it.

Two wheels turn out to be the best way to see Cape Town: street art and independent galleries slow enough to take in properly, the city's rhythm at ground level rather than through a coach window. The ride takes in a view of Table Mountain worth stopping for, before continuing out to the smaller towns on the city's edge, each with its own pace and character.

Ziplines cut across the canopy of one of South Africa's oldest forests, followed by an abseil down waterfalls into mountain pools below. The coastline here does its own kind of showing off: reefs, rivers and forest running straight down to the sea, dramatic enough that the activities almost feel secondary to the scenery.

Visit the Karoo towns, dry-land settlements that move at an entirely different speed. Montagu is the one to see by bicycle, specifically a hand-painted Dutch bicycle, weaving past art-filled streets and buildings that carry the town's history in their façades rather than in a museum display case.