And the sight of a dozen safari vehicles converging on a family of lions makes you fret about the way that the Travel Empire has conquered the Animal Kingdom. The Kenyan capital is base camp for more intensive - and expensive - safaris than a day out in Pilanesburg.Hang on, though: what about the corrosive impact of tourism on the environment and the people? Certainly the treatment of Kenya's Masai Mara, displaced from their homelands in the name of tourism, has been shameful. Nairobi is pounds 300 away, aboard Sudan Airways via Khartoum, and not very much more on less flamboyant airlines. This week Virgin Atlantic began flying Heathrow- Johannesburg, next month Britannia begins charters from Gatwick to South Africa's largest city and Cape Town. The rest of Africa is also opening up to the traveller.

The competition that is growing on flights to South Africa means fares to Johannesburg and Cape Town are falling. Sinuous giraffe, stumpy wildebeest and rhinos the size of small houses share South Africa's Pilanesburg National Park with each other and with tourists such as your jet-lagged self African wildlife has never been easier to meet. Wait quietly in your rental car and in a moment its stripey friends and relations will trot across the track, too. Half a day south of London, and three hours' drive across the parched, scraggy veldt, there is a zebra crossing. You feel that you can sometimes reach out and touch them."Whale WaysThere is plenty of choice for flights to South Africa from Virgin Atlantic to Britannia charters that start next month.Useful numbers: Whale Hotline (in South Africa) 0800 228 222; Whale Crier 083 212 1074; Greg Vogt, MTN Cape Whale Route 083 212 1270 or at Brenton on Sea Hotel 0445 810081; Western Cape Tourism Board, 021 418 3705; e-mail wctbcape iafrica .

Charlie Apples, a visitor from London, was bitten by the whale- watching bug: "The Kruger Park is very impressive and very commercialised, but it's so much nicer to get close to the whales here. Greg Vogt, the charismatic chairman of the MTN Cape Whale Route, argues: "You've got to remember that Southern Rights were hunted to virtual extinction, and they're only slowly making a comeback."Many whale watchers support moves to add whales to the country's "Big Five" top game animals (currently lions, elephants, rhino, leopards and buffalo). One of its officers at Still Bay, Cunny Jones, is worried: "We try our best to protect the whales but if you get idiots going up to them in rubber `ducks' (dinghies) when our backs are turned, there's very little we can do."Southern Right whales were the first of the large whales to be protected in South Africa, in 1935, and conservation bodies are anxious that the 37 species of whales and dolphins found in Southern African waters are not exploited. Transgressors face jail sentences of six years, though the government's Sea Fisheries Office admits that it lacks the manpower to patrol the coastline adequately. Most of the time, however, they loll around on the surface "spouting" (blowing unpleasantly smelly water vapour into the air) and "spy-hopping" (poking their heads out of the water to look around) or, more impressively, "fluking" (lifting their tails into the air before diving).Whereas boat-based whale watching has become highly organised in centres like Kaikoura in New Zealand, South Africa is taking the opposite approach Laws forbid boats from getting within 300 metres of whales. Few would dispute the claim, least of all between June and January when huge groups (known as "pods") of whales can often be observed swimming only metres away from the shore, and "breaching" spectacularly as they surge up and crash down like thunder into the sea. The body boasts that South Africa possesses "the world's best land-based whale watching".