Book excerpt: South Africa is a country facing great challenges, and opinions on its course into the future are widely divergent and often the source of heated debate at home and abroad. It is a land of people of many different cultures and diverse, often conflicting values - a mix which is at once the root of its great dilemma and the bud of its great potential. But on one thing there is general accord - South Africa is a beautiful land, and the traveller is faced with an almost unlimited choice fo what to see and do.