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Social upliftment
Soweto Bicycle Tours
Soweto Bicycle Tours, a home-grown initiative of Soweto Backpackers, will take you on a ground-level visit to this most famous of South African townships, former home of Nelson Mandela. And there are walking tours, tuk-tuks or cars available if you’re not much of a bike fan.
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The Waterberg Meander, Limpopo
The Waterberg Meander is a network of fascinating people and places bound together by this vast conservation area. There are private lodges, cultural villages, craft projects, social upliftment initiatives and national parks. The Waterberg Biosphere protects everyone’s well-being and livelihoods in this vast area. People here celebrate their cultural heritage.
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Dreamcatchers Alternative Winelands Tour, Western Cape
There are many kinds of wine routes in the world but very few offbeat wine routes. This 1, called the Dreamcatchers Alternative Winelands Tour, takes you from Cape Town through South Africa’s finest vineyards. You’ll find out the story behind the delicious bottled sunshine, the hardships and the joys.
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Calabash Tours
Calabash Tours will expose you to the real Port Elizabeth. You’ll see the historic city itself, the townships and the memorials. You’ll meet real people and experience the convivial atmosphere of shebeens in the evening. Port Elizabeth’s struggle against apartheid has left it with a fascinating past and present.
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Vondeling Optel Crafts
Vondeling Optel Crafts has brought unexpected blessings to the 30 families living in a tiny settlement not far from the Karoo town of Willowmore. It was a place more or less without unemployment or hope until a group of people were taught to make wire angels.
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Responsible Tourism in South Africa
South Africa is one of the foremost responsible tourism leaders in the world, with dozens of gorgeous destinations where communities are uplifted and the environment is protected. You’ll return home with a higher awareness of the interconnection between people and the earth. Plus memories of a really great time.
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Madikwe Game Reserve, North West
Madikwe Game Reserve, one of South Africa’s foremost Big 5 malaria-free reserves, was envisaged not by conservationists, but by economists. They found conservation would create more income and jobs than the existing land-use, which was cattle-farming. This successful reserve is now a model that has inspired South African conservation.
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Keiskamma Trust
The Keiskamma Trust in the tiny coastal town of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape may have had small beginnings as an embroidery venture, but it is now touching almost every aspect of this community. Apart from employment through art, it involves education, health, transferring life skills and more.
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The Keiskamma Art Project
The Keiskamma Art Project in the Eastern Cape town of Hamburg has helped bring hope and confidence to a group of rural women living in an area plagued by high levels of unemployment. They use their embroidery skills to create tapestries that tell stories reflecting their culture and history.
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Tracker Academy
The Tracker Academy teaches one of humanity’s earliest skills. It probably taught us the links between symbols and reality, perhaps priming our minds for reading and science. It is crucial for ecotourism, game management and research, yet until recently, skilled tracking was dying out. Now there is new hope.
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South Africa's struggle poets
South African performance poetry is alive and kicking, thanks to a strong tradition of using the spoken word to highlight injustice. Its guerilla cloak is discarded, however, when the spotlight falls on spoken-word or slam poetry in Speak the Mind at the Arts Alive festival in Johannesburg every September.
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South African social upliftment
Behind social upliftment projects - whether initiated by government, individuals or corporates - is a conscious goal. This is to find a new path that can redress past inequalities, support South African community tourism, increase quality of life, and offer visitors an enriching experience.
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Port Elizabeth township tours
A morning spent in the Port Elizabeth townships and settlements of Zwide, KwaZakhele and Ramaphosa puts you in the midst of a bustling street market, where sidewalk barbers, wire artists and hooting taxis hold sway. And rest assured – your touring company is an expert crew with a social conscience.
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Thakadu River Camp
Thakadu River Camp is one of the finest examples of responsible tourism bringing benefits – social and financial upliftment – to the local community that owns it. The 5-star lodge is Fair Trade in Tourism certified and is set on the eastern side of Madikwe Game Reserve, one of South Africa’s few malaria-free parks.
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Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project
The Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project (CLLP) is a community-based heritage and education project aimed at highlighting the living legacy of the San hunter-gatherers that lived in the Cederberg many thousands of years ago. The Cederberg is described as an outdoor art gallery and archaeological archive, and the origin of modern humans is written on its rock faces and cave walls.
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