Safe places to travel alone as a woman, South Africa done right

For the woman who wants to travel South Africa, and wants to get it right

If you’ve found this website, it’s likely that you have probably already half-planned the trip in your mind, maybe while doing your makeup in the morning, maybe between work meetings on a long and busy day. Maybe you have a vision board of pictures on your phone, or you get a little annoyed when you meet up with those friends who have been and can’t stop talking about a particular quality of light on those Cape Winelands afternoons. You’ve maybe nearly booked the trip twice, then changed your mind while hovering over the “purchase” button on those flight tickets.

But there’s always that niggle of doubt, that moment of hesitation that makes you navigate away from the page, and it is not the money, and it is not the logistics (although in Africa, that is a concern too). It is the question you do not always say out loud, which is whether it is actually safe to come on your own.

This is a valid fear. South Africa has a reputation on international stages. This poor rap is one of the reasons my mom and I founded this company, as two women who have lived in South Africa, and travelled broadly across the region our whole lives

South Africa is safe for female travellers and more than its headlines

Every country has a headline version of itself, and ours has had a particularly loud one for a long time, partly because the bad news travels further than the rest of it. But the South Africa we actually live in (and the one our guests fly home talking about) is a different proposition altogether.

It is the wine farmer in Stellenbosch who was the first wine maker in South Africa to plant Chenin Blanc, and who will tell you in great detail which glass to drink it from, and why it matters (His name is Ken Forrester, by the way). It is the bush at first light, when the sounds arrive before the shapes do and you understand what people mean when they call this place primal. It is Cape Town on an unremarkable Wednesday morning, with Table Mountain watching over the wakening city, as it has been doing, unchanged, for nearly 400 years.

South Africa rewards the brave, it is frontier country, after all. A woman who lands knowing where she is going, who is meeting her, where she is sleeping, and what tomorrow looks like will have a wildly different experience from one who lands and tries to figure it out in the airport queue. Wine & Wild exists in the gap between those two trips, and we are quite firm in our belief that you deserve the first one.

What “safe” actually looks like in practice

Safety is the structure underneath every curated Wine and Wild tour. Each part of your trip has been chosen with the solo female traveller in mind, from the first decision onward, and not as an afterthought, because we know how important this is to fellow female travellers.

Your accommodation has been hand-picked by founders who have stayed in the rooms, eaten in the restaurants, and quietly assessed the access, the staff, and the general feel of the place over a long lunch (sometimes more than one). Nothing makes it onto a Wine & Wild itinerary because it appeared on a list somewhere.

Your transfers are private and arranged in advance, and the person collecting you knows your name before your flight has touched down. You will not be standing alone outside an airport at 11pm trying to work out whether the guy trying to get you into his taxi has good intentions .

Your travelling group is made up entirely of women, and that one fact changes the texture of the whole trip. You won’t be navigating other people’s partners, mixed-group dynamics, or the particular awkwardness of being the only woman travelling on her own at a dinner table for ten. The women around you have all chosen the same thing you chose, and the dynamic settles into something easy almost immediately. Our guests mention this part more than any other, every time.

Your guides (on safari, at the wine estates, around Cape Town) have been chosen as much for the way they treat their guests as for what they know, which is a lot. Questions are welcome, the pace is yours, and nobody is hurrying you onto the next thing.

As founders, we are reachable (and usually with you) throughout your trip. This is not a call centre and it is not a duty manager. It is two women who have personally driven every road you will drive and sat at every table you will sit at.

Kruger Safari and Cape Winelands Tours

Wine & Wild currently runs two tours, and between them they cover the two parts of South Africa that most women have, somewhere in the back of their mind, been imagining for years.

The Kruger Safari Adventure is five days in Kruger National Park, which is to say five days inside the version of Africa you have been picturing since you first started thinking about this trip. Morning and afternoon game drives in open vehicles, private lodge accommodation, dinners under a sky that has more stars than you ever imagined, and a quality of bush silence that no photograph has yet quite managed. The whole thing has been built around women travelling alone or in small groups. 

The Cape Winelands Escape is six days in and around Cape Town. Table Mountain at sunset, the Stellenbosch wine estates with their oak-lined streets, the deeply French village of Franschhoek, long lunches at Babylonstoren, and the kind of slow sensory accumulation that takes a few days at home before it properly lands. In fact, our next tour is taking place in October 2026.

Both tours can be combined into a single eleven-day journey, so that you can have the wine and the wild in one trip, which is genuinely the only way to do justice to a country that is not really one country at all.

For women who have been waiting for the right way to go

There is a particular kind of traveller who knows exactly where she wants to go, and who has been waiting (quietly, patiently) for the right companion, the right moment, or the right reason to stop waiting. She is the person that we built Wine & Wild for. Not because she needs looking after (she categorically does not), but because after years of organising other people’s lives, she gets to have a trip that someone else has already thought through for her (we see you).

The experience of being completely held, of knowing that every detail has been curated before you even thought to ask the question, is in itself a particular kind of luxury. It also happens to be the thing women are quietly waiting to give themselves, often for a decade or more.

South Africa, for what it is worth, has been waiting for her too. It is considerably better than its reputation, and it is exactly as extraordinary as the Instagram posts suggest.

Speak with a founder before you book anything

Every Wine & Wild journey begins with a conversation, rather than a booking system or a quote request that disappears into a queue. You will be on the call one of us, usually Lynette because of her supreme experience in the travel industry, and she will tell you honestly whether Wine & Wild is the right fit for what you are looking for.

If it is, you will leave the call knowing what your trip looks like, what it costs, and what happens next. If it isn’t, because your dates don’t work or you are after something different from what we offer, we’ll will say so plainly and point you towards somewhere better suited (we would rather do that than sell you the wrong thing). The call is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is, without exception, where every Wine & Wild trip begins.

 

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