Ukhahlamba-drakensberg Park: World Heritage Sites of South Africa (World Heritage Sites of South Africa Travel Guides) [Paperback]

Philip Briggs (Author)

Book Description

Series: World Heritage Sites of South Africa Travel Guides | Publication Date: August 8, 2008

Let Southbound take you to a place of wonder and beauty that sprawls in breathtaking splendor between the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands and the ice-capped peaks of the Kingdom of Lesotho. The AmaZulu - 'People of Heaven' - who live in the long eastern shadow of the mountains call them uKhahlamba, the 'Barrier of spear'. The first Boer settlers to trail their ox-wagons into the foothills dubbed them the Drakensberg, the 'Dragon s mountain'. Both names are in official use today, but South Africans, in unconscious recognition of its singularity, tend simply to refer to the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg as The Berg - 'The Mountain'.

The Park - 2,500 square kilometers - the single largest mountain wilderness area protected anywhere in Africa

Sacred to the ancients, the Bushmen, as depicted in the highest concentration of rock art in Africa

A historical melting pot of Bushmen, Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Boer and Brit

A wealth of fauna and flora with 2,153 plant, 48 mammal and over 300 bird species identified

Detailed maps, color photographs, hiking trails and route guides

Comprehensive listings for travellers of places to go, things to see, and accommodation

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Philip Briggs is a travel writer and tour guide who specializes in East and Southern Africa. He was born in Britain and raised in South Africa; he has written many travel guides and other books on the African continent. He also has written for many naturalist magazines.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: 30 Degrees South (August 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0958489165
• ISBN-13: 978-0958489164
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 3.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,429,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

African travel specialist Philip Briggs has been exploring the highways, byways and backwaters of the world's most challenging and exciting continent since 1986, when he spent several months backpacking on a shoestring from Nairobi to Cape Town. In 1991, he wrote the Bradt Guide to South Africa, the first such guidebook to be published internationally after the release of Nelson Mandela.

Over the rest of the 1990s, Philip wrote a series of pioneering Bradt Guides to destinations that were then - and in some cases still are - otherwise practically uncharted by the travel publishing industry. These included the first dedicated guidebooks to Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda (co-authored with Janice Booth), all of which are now in their 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th edition.

Philip has visited more than two dozen African countries, and written about most of them, whether it be for guidebook publishers such as AA, APA-Insight, Berlitz, Camerapix, Dorling Kindersley, Frommers, Struik-New Holland and 30 Degrees South, or for specialist travel and wildlife magazines including Africa Birds & Birding, Africa Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa and Wanderlust.

He still spends at least four months on the road every year, and spends his rest of the time battering away at a keyboard in the sleepy dorp of Bergville, in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region of South Africa. He is married to the travel photographer Ariadne Van Zandbergen and lives with three dogs and a cat. When not obssessing over some or other aspect of African history, culture, wildlife or travel, Philip's interests include music, reading and walking.