You may want to start your Gauteng Tour around the City of Gold. Johannesburg, South Africa’s industrial and financial heartland, offer a myriad of attractions, not the least of them some fine museums, theatres, shopping malls and a selection of restaurants to cater for every culinary taste.

Gold Reef city, an exuberant re-creation of the early mining days, ranks among the country’s top tourist draw-cards, but for those avoiding theme parks, then excursions from Johannesburg would include SOWETOLost City, Botanical Garden Tours, Pretoria – the Jacaranda City and the Cullinan Diamond Mine. township tours, the Sterkfontein Cave Complex, Sun City and the Cullinan Diamond Mine.

Gauteng may be the smallest province in South Africa, but most international flights are hosted bu the O.R. Tambo International airport just outside Johannesburg.

Nearly every Tour of South Africa begins in Gauteng, so your Gauteng Tour takes you into the other regions whether it be by rail, air or road. 

The energy of the Highveld, with its intense summers broken only by intermittent electric storms, is echoed in the sheer buzz of the place. In Johannesburg everything is done at high speed, walking, talking, driving, and even the ever increasing skyline seems to grow  overnight - it all reflects the rapid development that has taken place in the city in the last 10 years. Today Jozi is free of discriminatory laws. The inner city is awash with hawkers and street stalls, completely multiracial, and undergoing a total regeneration. The more wealthy have escaped to the leafy northern suburbs, the sprawling malls and restaurant-lined avenues attractive to visitors and residents alike.

Pretoria provides a more laid-back, gentrified alternative - its jacaranda lined, wide streets and lovely old buildings a more sedate choice. The leafy city of Pretoria in Gauteng serves as one of the country’s three capital cities, officially the executive or administrative capital - the other two are Cape Town, the legislative capital, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital.

The pretty city suffers from an almost menacing image as the former capital of apartheid, and is involved in an ongoing battle over changing its name to Tshwane - controversial to most inhabitants of the city, and, for the moment, left to lie ‘under consideration’. The municipality refers to it as the City of Tshwane, whilst residents still largely refer to it as Pretoria. It appears that in history there has always been some difficulty over naming the city. Pretoriusdorp, Pretorium, Pretoriusstad and Pretoria-Philadelphia were among early suggestions, from which Pretoria was finally selected by Marthinus Wessel Pretorius in memory of his father, Andries Pretorius.