<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">South African Fever:
A Travel Diary

A luxury tour of South Africa—with a side trip to nearby Zambia to see Victoria Falls—is a study in contrasts. The accommodations are amazing, the safaris and shark-encounters life-changing, but the reminders of surrounding poverty and racial separation are also sobering.
By Lawrence Ferber

An Advocate.com exclusive posted 12/27/02

If you asked me to name 10 places I’d have liked to visit a year ago, South Africa would not have been among them. Until I went there, my vision of South Africa was a blurry and barely alluring montage of ramshackle townships, antiapartheid campaigns, and racial tensions escalating to violence. So when I was invited to join a DavidTours (www.davidtours.com) luxury gay tour to South Africa and Zambia, apprehension struck.

But I did some asking around and learned much of postapartheid life, the San Francisco–esque Cape Town, and a thriving gay scene. In the end, away I went along with DavidTours’ erudite owner, David Rubin (who also arranges independent, customized three- to five-star travel at www.valueandstyle.com), and a handful of other journalists.</font>