One would think that the very business of day-to-day survival, in the concrete jungle or otherwise, was adrenaline-filled enough.  One would also have thought that the main aim of any traveller to or within South Africa would be to arrive back home in one piece.  But no, there are people out there who actively go out and look for heart-stopping excitement.  Perhaps they think that once you have outrun a rhino, eyeballed a shark and fallen down a cliff – then facing down the boss on Monday morning is no big deal. 

I also had no idea that South Africa had so many unusual and enterprising ways of getting a thrill.  This was until I hit upon a booklet called ‘Dirty Boots’, which features 100 ways to get nose-to-nose with adventure.  The booklet is a bit of an adrenaline-ride of its own.  Its introduction states:  “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” Which is as good a way of saying – get out there and do something extraordinary, people. The brochure is logically laid out, beginning with a list of those governing associations in charge of making sure that you complete your adventures with the same number of limbs as when you started out.  The adventures are then divided into geographical regions so that you can look up your nearest death-defying activity, and colour-coded so that it is easy to deduce just how death-defying it is.  The list of activities is also a good indication of how innovative many of our tourism operators are in keeping our holiday-makers busy.  Here are some examples. For the uninitiated, abseiling is a so-called sport where you run down sheer cliff faces while attached to pulleys, cleats and ropes.  If you should suddenly change your mind about this, there is a co-ordinator with a cattle-prod.  It’s one of those sports where you wonder why it is necessary to run down a sheer drop when there is a perfectly good cable-car but once you have done it the thrill is unbelievable.  Abseiling happens anywhere: the Oribi Gorge, the Howick Falls, the Drakensberg. There is even an extreme version called rap jumping, where you run military-style face-first down a concrete dam wall.   Bungee jumping is another of those things that blurs the line between terror and joy, and there are several famous bungee sites such as the Blaauwkrans Bridge and the Orlando Cooling Towers in Soweto. White-water rafting is one of those eye-stretching activities where every time you open your mouth to scream in fear, you swallow water.  This is actually a safety mechanism – all that water lowers your centre of gravity and decreases your chances of capsizing.  South Africa has lots of good-grief rivers for white-water, and this booklet lists them all. In fact, all watersports are well-represented, with different crafts and a variety of locations. Some of the more unusual activities in the book include a steel-track toboggan, exploring the tunnels underneath Cape Town, diving with crocodiles at the Cango Caves, climbing the world’s highest spiral staircase, cycling a bike through townships, riding a zip-line (no, I’m not going to tell you, you must look it up…), spelunking, stand-up paddling – it is hard to believe that there are so many adventures within our borders.  For the more leisurely and/or timid types, there are unusual viewing opportunities:  turtles at Sodwana, whale-watching, walking safaris, houseboating, hot-air ballooning.  There is even a night-time tour of the SALT telescope at Sutherland for star-gazing.  The Michael Schumachers among us can drive an actual racing car on the F1 track at Kyalami in Gauteng.  Or they can take their pick of a number of machines that have been pressed into service to give tourists a thrill, from vintage World War II sidecar motorbikes that offer a trip through the Winelands, to gyroplanes over the Northern Cape, to flying in a 1941 Tiger Moth over the Magaliesberg.   There is an enormous variety of things to ride while sightseeing:  camels in the Northern Cape, elephants in the Pilanesberg, ponies in Lesotho, sand-boards and toboggans down sand dunes, horses all over the place.  Horse-trails are very different depending on where you are doing them:  along the beach, through the game reserve, through mountain trails, over the ‘verlate vlaktes’. “The Traveller is active, he goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience.  The Tourist is passive, he expects interesting things to happen to him.  He goes ‘sightseeing’.”  These wise words come from American academic, Daniel J Boorstin, who was the director the Smithsonian Institution and wrote three definitive books about lifestyle.  This quote is one of many dotted through the book.  And so  – what does that make you? If you would like to be a traveller and not a tourist, get your free copy of the Dirty Boots booklet from   www.dirtyboots.co.za