Two lions, single file on the evening savanna. The poverty and pride of a township holding 1.5 million people. Sugar, eucalyptus, macadamia, mango, and vineyards as far as the eye can see. The spices, calls to prayer, fleeting veil-concealed glances, potency cures and tongues of the marketplace.

Bodysurfing in the Indian Ocean at sunrise. Biltong. Majestic Table Mountain and windswept, next-stop-Antarctica Cape of Good Hope. Mandela's autobiography in situ. Portuguese prawn curry and dry white at a Mozambiquan bistro. A lonely train whistle on the Great Karoo at midnight. The inescapable legacy of apartheid.

My wife, Audrey, and I traversed South Africa for two weeks in early September, celebrating our empty nesthood and stealing time together. We chose South Africa because it is the other side of our world, to see the wildlife, and to learn the lessons of apartheid and its overthrow. We experienced all that and far more.

Our travel style was Lonely Planet/Fifties. As classic free and independent travelers, we had a general itinerary and I booked basics such as car rentals, Kruger National Park and major city lodgings in advance online — but we made the rest easily enough in-country.

On a scale of 1 (my backpacking youth) to 5 (luxury safaris), we traveled at around 3, at about $150 per day for both of us all-inclusive, benefiting from a good exchange rate and discounted offers.

South Africa is 12 time zones away and just about our antipode, so the first challenge is getting there and back. Thirty-six hours of back-to-back flights sounds bad, but slipped by and was quickly forgotten amid a fascinating country.

DIVERSE CULTURE

The first thing to understand about traveling in South Africa is its size and geographic diversity. It's almost twice the size of Texas, with mountains and deserts, rolling pastoral hills right out of England, vast open veld (plains) like the Australian outback, subtropics and beaches, and distinctly different in-country climate zones. We hit 90-degree days in Kruger and Durban, and 40ish nights in Cape Town, in their early spring.

South Africa, like Hawai'i, is inescapably about its diverse history and culture. Its story encompasses today's Africans, which number 80 percent of South Africa's 50 million people; descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers (Afrikaners) and British colonists, make up 10 percent; the descendants of mostly Indian sugar plantation laborers, with striking similarities to our Chinese, Japanese and Filipino heritages, make up 3 percent; and other races, including Asians as well as our hapa, are about 7 percent of the population. In South Africa, Caucasians are often termed "white," Indians "Asian" and other Asians and mixed-ethnicities "coloured."

It's about apartheid: Centuries-long discrimination by colonial Caucasians against the other three groups ripened into government suppression and separation before its termination in the 1990s through the struggles of Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela and others. To travel South Africa is to seek glimpses of that complexity and its lessons.

The first part of our journey took us almost 1,500 miles by rental car from Joburg northeast, down through Kruger for four days, then three days overland through the heart of Kwa Zulu Natal to Durban on the Indian Ocean coast.

The second part was two days in Durban, a flight to Cape Town for four nights in a City Bowl condotel, then a 1,000-mile train ride back to Joburg.

AMAZING KRUGER

Kruger exceeded our high expectations. Imagine a wide open reserve the size of our state with roles reversed: wildlife roaming free around us humans in our cages of cars and fenced areas. "Camps" are strategically placed throughout, each with its own character mirroring its surroundings, and most offering amenities and games drives ($20). Accommodations range from tent sites to self-contained rondavals ($80); our favorite was at Oliphants, perched on a plateau over the river stretching out to a limitless horizon, where we cooked to the sounds and smells of the oncoming night.

And the wildlife! An abundance of birds, elephants, giraffes, impalas, kudu, hippos, crocodiles, baboons. Lion and rhino twice, a leopard languishing in the crook of a huge tree at twilight, a cheetah and her five cubs unexpectedly around a bend. All-encompassing vistas, something unexpectedly new and surprising always. Kruger alone was worth the price of admission.

Our route to the coast lay through the contrasts of immense plantations, roadside fruit stands, belching factories and mining shantytowns. The reality of apartheid began to hit home as we passed for hours on back roads through a desperately poor district of small farms and villages, coming suddenly to rich farmlands; only later did we realize we'd transited one of the "independent homelands" into which the white government essentially herded the African majority during apartheid.

History enveloped as we passed through the heart of the Zulu nation, united under Shaka in a story similar to Kamehameha's era, and the legendary battlefields of the Boer (Dutch for farmer)-Zulu, British-Zulu and Boer-British wars.

Durban was a mixed bag. The city of 3 million enjoys a stunning setting, a 4-mile-long beachfront, and, with its large Indian and Muslim populations, a cosmopolitan feel, including great food. Its cultural history is rich with its own twists; for example, Durban was the site of Gandhi's formative years. However, we felt a sense of neglect, despite the city's gleaming new soccer stadium, part of South Africa's countrywide preparations for World Cup 2010.

Crime, South Africa's Achilles' heel, induces an unnerving, constant vigilance in visitors and residents alike. Visitors are warned against exploring the city on their own; they're advised instead to join one of many organized tours.

APARTHEID'S LEGACY

Lost opportunity tugged as we overflew the Eastern Cape to Cape Town, truly one of our world's great cities. It's not just its spectacular setting, dominated by Table Mountain, as internationally iconic as Diamond Head, not just the picturesque wine country and coastal towns, not just the Cape Muslim (Malaysian/Indonesian slave descendants) culture and cuisine, not just the Lahaina feel of Saturday-night Long Street. It's the fusion of European, African and Asian cultures colliding, interacting, evolving over four centuries now, something like our own Hawai'i experience.

Even in this somewhat surreal un-African enclave of South Africa, the reality of South Africa past and present crowds in.

We visited District Six in Cape Town central, home for generations to non-whites before their forcible removal during apartheid to make room for whites.

We also toured nearby Cape Flats townships to which non-whites are still relegated — including Khayelitsha outside Joburg, the second most populous township nationwide, after Soweto (an abbreviation of "South Western Townships"), where a population larger than Hawai'i lives in an area the size of Kapolei. Yet despite the incredible disparities between the townships and Clifton's Sausalito-like oceanfront homes just miles away, one does not sense pervasive anger or desperation but a focus on a better future.

That's encouraging, because apartheid's remnants surround you every day, around every corner, in de facto separation and underlying tension. For example, it was 10 days before we even saw another interracial couple; the awareness of being different, absent when we landed, oozed in over time. Perhaps that's to be expected; it's been only half a generation since apartheid's formal end. But it will take looking forward together rather than back to complete South Africa's transition.

The train to Joburg, $50 with sleeper, worked its powers of reflection. In two weeks, had we really seen South Africa or even begun to understand?

We'd seen a lot — the sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes of the veld, wildlife, towns, cultures, cuisines, ocean and open road were deliciously new and diverse — but left so much on the table. Understanding, though: that remains elusive.

Some journeys are comfortable and satisfying; others challenging and unfulfilling. South Africa was clearly the latter.

But if travel is an adventure of the senses and mind, this country of wonderful gifts and promise was ideal.

Ed Case is a Honolulu attorney and ex-Congressman. He can be reached at edcasehawaii@aol.com.