South Africa |
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South Africa is the southernmost country on the African continent and it takes a 11-hour flight from Germany, to get to South Africa. It shares borders with Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe in the North, and Mozambique in the East. In South Africa, the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet off the Southern Cape coast. The longest river is the Orange River which is a part of the border to Namibia. The Tugela Falls are the second-highest waterfalls in the world. The most southern point in South Africa is Cape Agulhas which is 120km east of Cape Town.
In South Africa, you will find a high plateau in the interior of the country. South Africa has various mountain ranges and the grasslands. Johannesburg lies on a 1,700m high plateau, but most of the bigger cities such as Cape Town, Durban or Port Elizabeth, are located near the coast in low-lying areas. In the mountain ranges of the Drakensberg region (especially in the Lesotho mountains) there is snow in winter and you even could go skiing. Sometimes also the higher mountain tops in the Western Cape near Cape Town receive some snow in winter, but it is not enough to go skiing.
South Africa is a medium-sized country, with a total land area of slightly more than 1.2-million square kilometres, which is roughly the same size as Niger, Angola, Mali, and Colombia. It is one-eighth the size of the US and over three times the size of Germany. South Africa measures about 1 600km from north to south, and roughly the same from east to west.
The country has nine provinces as you can see in the picture, the smallest is very tiny and called Gauteng (6), a highly urbanised region, and the largest is the vast, empty and arid Northern Cape (3), which takes up almost a third of South Africa's total land area.
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