Riding the Historic Rovos Rail Across Untrammeled Corners of Southern Africa

24.10.2023 - 17:39 / cntraveler.com / Africa

I was in the back of a Pretoria junk shop, when I came across a zoetrope under a dusty canvas cover. A predecessor of film, the instrument consists of a metal cylinder that, when sent spinning, sets a series of images pasted in its interior in motion. Inside of that particular model was a sequence of identical chestnut horses, each in a slightly different running position. I turned the cylinder, put my eye to a slot, and the horse began its staccato canter.

I smiled at this little optical trick, which was much like the view from the window of a train—snippets of individual frames which, strung together by memory, moved smooth as film. It rendered my next move in light and color—that afternoon, I was leaving Pretoria aboard the Rovos Rail, on a train journey that would bear me and 62 others north through South Africa, then cut a path across Zimbabwe, and four days later, deliver us to Victoria Falls.

Like a zoetrope, a train journey is made of a succession of stillnesses—images that flash before us and fix in our minds to create a procession of flickering memory. A first picture: my partner and I seated in the pillared dining car, a rack of lamb and a bottle of Stellenbosch Cabernet between us, when a flash of lightning shattered our reflections in the window. A short interval of thunder mingled with the rumble of the train rolling north as the lights of Pretoria faded away behind us.

Meals are served in Victorian-style, wood-paneled dining cars, complemented by the finest South African wines.

These were the first rains of the season, bringing cool relief to the salty soil of the Limpopo, where water and prosperity are forever tied together. The first Voortrekker settlers of this region, stopping to quench their oxen in a north-flowing river, christened that water the Nylstroom, imagining it rolled onward to feed the distant Nile. They were wrong, but from that stream they sluiced their first gold, and the future of South Africa was set.

As we clickity-clacked over that river, we were in the kind of luxury those pioneers could only dream of. On this brace of 19 carriages we had the run of two dining cars, a lounge car, and an observation car hooked on the end. Our suite was our private, climate-controlled warren—a wide double bed snug against the window, a writing table, a wardrobe, and an en-suite shower and toilet. All of it was designed in-house, to Rovos’ own specifications, the warm, wood-paneled suite in which I stood, proof positive of the craftsmanship of the Rovos workforce.

The Rovos line in all its splendor—a vision of green and white carriages that draws the eye across the yellow veld—owes its existence to the foresight of South African Rohan Vos, who, back in 1989, took the business from