ToGO or not ToGO
Price range: R220,00 through R550,00
For the independent traveller – a route planner
ISBN:978-0-620-48852-5
187 Pages
Eight specific routes crisscrossing central South Africa and Lesotho, all recently travelled by the author, and presented in a conversational style, enhanced by superb images. “ToGO or not ToGO” is a testimony to eight years of garnering lesser-known facts about the lessor-know places – a compendium designed to help tailor a route to suit the time and pocket of those who enjoy slow travelling on roads less travelled.
Side-bars, with fascinating snippets of background information on the history and customs of the people, and environmental details or the various areas, add lustre to a quality publication the can GO anywhere, be it at home on your coffee table, or in your travel bag.
Click on the thumbnails below to view a sample of the book
Additional information
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| Book Format | eBook, Hard Cover, Soft Cover |
MG Andrew –
Anita Henning modestly refers to her book as a “Route Planner’, but it is in fact a skillful blend of photography, travel-writing, natural and social history and geography.
In another part of the book, she refers to it as a “comprehensive book of pleasure” – it certainly provides a great deal of pleasure.
If you have already visited some of these places in southern Africa and you read this book, you will want to return with the new information gained, and if you have never travelled to the places mentioned, this book will be an indispensable companion and source of information.
The photographs are impressive; the quotations that range from St Augustine to Robert Louis Stevenson to Susan Sontag to Nelson Mandela, are fascinatingly appropriate; and the writing is not only informative but at times humorous and chatty.
This could be a coffee table book, but it is rather a relevant source of information for a traveller, whether he or she is local or foreign.
Rose Willis –
ToGO or not ToGO is a book with a difference. It’s a superbly-illustrated travel guide taking even the armchair traveller to some known and lesser-known regions and places across South Africa. Compiled by Anita Henning, a photo-journalist, and editor of the popular bi-monthly magazine-cum-journal ToGOTo, this coffee table book is a collection of articles published over the last eight years. Aimed at the independent, discerning traveler, it’s much more than a travel guide. It leads to tranquil and picturesque areas, such as the early morning, mist-covered Atlantic coast, where there is even a place called Grootmis and where diamond dredgers dot the sea, as well as along remote, extreme, exhilarating, rocky mountain roads such as the one to Sehlabathebe – the plateau of the shield – a paradise in the sky.
Detailed maps allow the traveller to journey confidently through KwaZulu Natal, the Free State, across the arid plains of the Great Karoo, across the flower carpets of Namakwaland, to the dams of Lesotho as well as to the Eastern Cape where villages are steeped in the history of the Frontier Wars. It’s a volume of good stories and fascinating facts. The routes are tried and tested; Anita has travelled them all, sometimes more than once. In the book she offers sage advice: NEVER pass a clean toilet, NEVER pass a filling station, NEVER pass a lodge, and NEVER pass a Chinese shop. They sell almost everything – so if your bug spray runs out, that’s where you will find it. Also invaluable in the book is a glossary explaining the meaning of words such as bosluis, basters, spaza and lifaqane, plus a semantics section which gives interesting brief origins of town names.
L Blignaut –
To Go or Not to Go is a guide for travellers, not those who wish to say been there, done that. It covers roads less travelled. The title of this travel guide may paraphrase Hamlet, but it leaves little doubt on whether to travel or not. It is also very much about the journey and not the destination. Invites you to look deep and step into the landscape you are travelling across. I have driven many of the roads featured in the guide, but unfortunately, I always had a specific destination in mind. As a result, I missed much of the magic of Southern Africa. The photography is evocative and conveys a sense of place (an entirely appropriate cliché). Stirs imagination and curiosity. The guide is quite practical and spiritual at the same time. Most of all it will lead you to verdant valleys, mountains that gnarl, winter chill, beaches, crashing waves, open deserts and big skies. It is also a bit of a history and geography lesson featuring people, fauna and flora. It ties the various strands of Southern Africa’s history together. The writer also enlightens the reader with thought provoking quotes from poets, politicians and scientists that enshrine the landscapes. My favourite quote is Albert Einstein saying the most disappointing thing about travelling is arrival. Could not agree more.