Rovos Rail – Things to know before you book

There are journeys where the goal is simply to get from one destination to another. And then there is Rovos Rail. Travelling aboard Rovos Rail means deliberately slowing things down. Instead of flying over Southern Africa, you watch the landscape change outside your window, broken up by carefully selected stops along the way: a game drive, a historic town, desert dunes. Dinner is a dressed-up occasion in a wood-panelled dining car, and afternoons disappear in the observation car as another corner of the continent rolls past. But what is travelling on Rovos Rail actually like? Which route should you choose? And is it worth including in your itinerary?

Every train carries a maximum of 72 passengers, which keeps the whole experience closer to a small hotel than a packed carriage. There are three suite categories.

All three are ensuite, with air conditioning, a safe and daily servicing.

The communal spaces do a lot of the work too. There is a main lounge car, plus a smaller lounge where smoking is permitted. At the very back is the observation car, an open-air platform where most people end up standing at sunset, watching the line disappear behind the train rather than looking out ahead of it. Dinner gets its own stage: the dining car turns meals into a proper sit-down event rather than something eaten off a tray.

There are deliberately no televisions, radios or WiFi aboard, so the experience encourages you to disconnect rather than fill every spare moment (WiFi is available at Rovos Rail’s Cape Town and Pretoria lounges). Guests read, play cards or board games, talk to other travellers, have a drink, or simply watch a part of Southern Africa that most visitors would normally fly over.

Rovos Rail runs a mix of short escapes and multi-country expeditions, all departing from Pretoria’s Capital Park Station and available in reverse.

One of the best ways to experience Rovos Rail is to make it one memorable chapter of a larger African journey, rather than the whole holiday itself, and that’s exactly how we build it into our own itineraries. We weave Rovos Rail into routes that already run through the regions we know well. The Pretoria to Victoria Falls train passes through Hwange National Park before reaching the falls, the same ground many of our self-drive itineraries cover by road through Botswana or Zimbabwe. The Pretoria to Walvis Bay train crosses the Namib Desert the way a self-drive Namibia itinerary does at ground level, just from a train window instead of a windscreen. A train journey and a self-drive safari ask different things of a traveller. The train takes care of everything and keeps its own rhythm, game drives, meals, a change of scenery outside your suite window. A self-drive hands back the keys and the pace instead. Several guests have used one to bookend the other: a few nights aboard Rovos Rail to open or close a trip, then a tailor-made safari circuit through the regions the train only glimpses from the window.

A couple of our itineraries show exactly how this plays out. One was a 15-day trip through South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Rather than flying back from Victoria Falls, the travellers closed the trip with 3 nights aboard Rovos Rail instead: a game drive through Hwange National Park, then on to Pretoria via the Tropic of Capricorn. The other was a 19-day circuit through South Africa, Eswatini, Botswana and Zimbabwe. It gave the same corridor 4 nights, with time off the train at both Hwange and Matobo National Park along the way.
In both cases, the train wasn’t the whole trip. It was the unhurried final chapter of one.

Rovos Rail suits travellers who want the journey itself to be the point, not just the transport between two points on a map. It’s a natural fit for a honeymoon, an anniversary, or anyone who would rather watch Africa unfold slowly than tick through it by air.
A few things worth knowing before booking: suites, especially Royal Suites, sell out well ahead on popular routes like Victoria Falls and Cape Town, so these are worth locking in early in the planning process rather than as an afterthought. Each journey includes off-train excursions at stops along the route, so it’s rarely just time spent in the cabin. And because departures run to a fixed schedule rather than on demand, a Rovos Rail leg needs to anchor the rest of the itinerary’s dates, not the other way around.