September 2, 2024, 3:52 pm | Read time: 8 minutes
Enjoy the romance of rail travel and the wild nature of Africa – the Pride of Africa from Rovos Rail offers this on multi-day tours through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania. Our author experienced South Africa at its most beautiful on the short route from Pretoria to Durban.
It rattles and creaks; you can hear every rail seam. I look out the window and see every star in the deep black night sky somewhere between Pretoria and Durban in KwaZulu-Natal. It has become cold. Although it was around 25 degrees Celsius during the day, I now have to snuggle up in my double bed and drink a roibos tea. Wait, a double bed on the train? Yes, that’s possible on board the Pride of Africa.
Overview
Since 1989, Rovos Rail, founded by Rohan Vos, has been transporting tourists in old, historically restored South African State Railways trains. On selected routes, they travel through large parts of South Africa with the comfort of a five-star hotel on rails. All because Vos wanted to travel by train with his family through his home country of South Africa.
“But the track prices were so high that I had to find a way to pay for it – so I took people willing to pay with me,” summarizes Vos as he shows us around the workshops at an old station outside Pretoria before departure. This is where old steam locomotives are serviced, and aging wagons are restored. The company currently offers a total of eleven different routes. Two years ago, my husband and I had the opportunity to take a three-day tour from Pretoria to Durban in the Pride of Africa on our honeymoon – with all the ups and downs.
Overview of
Pride of Africa: How to start a journey with Rovos Rail
Our “Durban Safari” route takes us 800 kilometers in three days with two overnight stays. We travel from the South African capital, Pretoria, to Durban on the Indian Ocean, through the dreamy landscapes of KwaZulu-Natal, past the picturesque Drakensberg Mountains.
If you book a trip on the Pride of Africa, you can look forward to one of the most luxurious trains in the world. This starts even before the journey. We drop off our luggage at an old colonial station in Pretoria. We pass the waiting time until departure in a luxurious waiting room reminiscent of an English tea room. Sandwiches, wine, tea, fruit, and small cakes are served. In the meantime, all passengers’ travel documents are being checked.
Afterward, Rohan Vos personally guides you through the maintenance halls of his Rovos Rail. Here, he gives you a look behind the scenes before you can finally enter the historic 1920s-styled wagons. Heavy carpets, upholstery, and wooden furniture transport passengers back in time. Our suite, the “Modder,” is around ten square meters in size. It comprises a double bed, desk, closet, tea corner, fridge, and bathroom with a proper shower and toilet. It looks like a small hotel room on wheels. A bottle of Cap Classique, the South African version of champagne, awaits us as a welcome drink.
These routes are on offer:
In addition to the short route from Pretoria to Durban or vice versa, the Pride of Africa runs through the southern and eastern parts of the continent. The longest train journeys are up to 6,000 kilometers long and take a good 15 days. Anyone who decides to make such a journey must have a lot of patience, as we will soon find out.
The South African rail network is dilapidated, the tracks are old, and copper thieves cause the odd delay. The same goes for spontaneous staff shortages. Even though Rovos Rail is a private company, the railroad company has to use train drivers from the South African State Railways for most of the route. It can happen that a train driver ends his shift in the middle of the route, and there is no replacement in sight. This means waiting in the middle of nowhere on the tracks.
But as soon as the train starts rolling, you experience a picture-book feeling of freedom. This inspires us to stream Disney’s “The Lion King” on the iPad while the African landscape passes us by. If we hadn’t included the trip as part of a package tour, we would have found it difficult to choose a route. These are the options:
- Cape Town: 3 nights, 1,600 kilometers from Cape Town to Pretoria
- Durban Safari: 2 nights, 800 kilometers from Pretoria to Durban
- Victoria Falls: 3 to 4 nights, 1,400 kilometers from Pretoria to the Victoria Falls
- Golf Safari: 9 nights, 2,1000 kilometers round trip in South Africa with visits
- Namibia Safari: 11 nights, 3,400 kilometers from Walvis Bay (Namibia) to Pretoria (South Africa)
- African Collage: 12 nights, 3,700 kilometers from Cape Town to Pretoria
- Southern Cross: 11 nights, 2,500 kilometers from Pretoria to Victoria Falls
- African Trilogy: 15 nights, 5,000 kilometers from Walvis Bay (Namibia) to Pretoria (South Africa)
- Dar es Salaam: 15 nights, 5,530 kilometers from Cape Town (South Africa) via Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania
- Trail of Two Oceans: 15 nights, 4,300 kilometers from Lobito (Angola) to Dar es Salaam (Tanzania)
- Copper Trail: 14 nights, 3,100 kilometers from Lobito (Angola) to the Victoria Falls
Fine dining, fine drinks, and exciting excursions: what a day on a luxury train is like
A trip on the Pride of Africa is not just a journey back in time but also an adventure. On the rails, you seem to forget all sense of time and space. Thank goodness for the friendly train crew, who ring a little bell before every à la carte breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the dining car. The price of the journey includes drinks. The dress code on the train is smart casual. This means a cocktail dress for ladies, a shirt, long trousers, and a jacket for men.
Between sections of the route, the old train makes frequent stops for smaller excursions, in our case, a safari in the private Nambiti Reserve. Here, you theoretically have the opportunity to see the “Big Five”, i.e. lion, elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo and leopard. We only managed to see three – the elephant, rhino, and leopard – but it was still a unique experience.
On the way back, it was already dark, but our vehicle stopped right by the track in the South African grasslands. There, we were served wine and sandwiches under the stars. The next day, another excursion took us to a ceramics factory inspired by the traditional crafts and art of the tribes in KwaZulu-Natal. You can pass the time in between on the train either in the lounge car with board games such as Scrabble, chess, or checkers and a tea time or in the lounge car at the end of the train with a classic bar and viewing car, where you can watch the landscape pass by in the open air.
However, travelers on the Rovos Rail also have to face South Africa’s poverty. While you enjoy your gin and tonic in the sumptuous lounge car, the train winds its way through townships, children wave at the train on the track. In between, repeated announcements warn that you must pull down the steel roller blind when not in your cabin to avoid theft. On our journey, one of the train windows was even smashed. But that’s just part of traveling through South Africa.
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Dates, prices, and more: all the information about the Pride of Africa from Rovos Rail
In addition to the deluxe suite we booked, there are two other room categories in the Pride of Africa. These are the 16 square meter Royal Suite with its own bathtub and additional sofa bed and the simple seven square meter Pullman Suites with folding sofa and table as well as their own mini bathroom.
The eleven routes run on different dates throughout the year between October and September and operate in both directions. The cost of the Pride of Africa varies depending on the destination, duration, and cabin category selected. The trip from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam in the Royal Suite in 2024 will cost around 21,000 euros per person. However, the same trip in the Pullman Suite will only cost around 12,100 euros.
However, the shorter tours are correspondingly cheaper. You can book the “Durban Safari” we booked from 1,500 euros. The prices are independent of the seasons and the exact travel dates but change yearly depending on the season. You can find the exact dates and prices here. When our journey ends at Durban Central Station, the luggage is removed from the train, the train crew loads the suitcases for transfer to our hotels and says goodbye to the travelers – and we look back nostalgically on three days of train adventure in the middle of Africa.