The journey begins at Cape Town Station in the late afternoon, with the train pulling out at four. There is time to settle into your suite and find the lounge and observation cars as the line climbs out of the city, the vineyards and mountains of the Western Cape giving way to the farmland around Worcester. Tea is served as the coastal country falls behind and the train works inland and up.

Dinner is worth knowing about up front. Evenings on Rovos are formal, and the kitchen is genuinely good, so it is worth leaning into rather than dressing down. As you dine, the train begins its climb up the Hex River Pass, the dramatic ascent that lifts the line nearly 750 metres from the valley toward the Karoo plateau, threading the four tunnels that carry the railway through the mountains. The longest of them runs around thirteen and a half kilometres, among the longest railway tunnels in South Africa, and the carriages go dark as you pass through, so take care moving about late in the evening.

After dinner the observation car, open at the back of the train, is the place to be, with the dark mountain country going by behind you. By the time you turn in, the train is up on the plateau and out into the Great Karoo, heading for Matjiesfontein and the first excursion of the trip in the morning.

Breakfast is served as the train crosses the Great Karoo in the early light, the wide semi-desert opening out beyond the windows. In the morning you reach Matjiesfontein, a perfectly preserved Victorian railway village on the edge of the Karoo and a national heritage site, where stepping off the train is like stepping back into the late nineteenth century.

Matjiesfontein was founded in 1884 by the Scottish railwayman James Logan as a refreshment stop and health resort on the line, drawing visitors to the dry Karoo air. The single main street, the Lord Milner Hotel, the old station, and the platform museum have all been kept much as they were, with a collection of vintage cars and railway carriages alongside. It is a small, quiet, slightly eccentric place, and an easy one to wander on foot.

Back on board, the train ventures deeper into the Karoo, the vast semi-desert that was once an inland sea; over millions of years its sediments were laid down and worn into the flat-topped hills and open plains you see now, and it is one of the world’s great fossil grounds. Lunch and tea are served as the country rolls past, the light shifting across the plains through the afternoon. Dinner is formal as the train continues north through the night, working toward the diamond fields and the second excursion in the morning.

An early breakfast as the train approaches Kimberley, the town that diamonds built. The morning is spent at the Diamond Mine Museum and the Big Hole. Diamonds were found here in 1871, setting off one of the great rushes of the nineteenth century, and the Big Hole is the largest hand-dug excavation in the world, a vast crater now part-filled with water, with the underground workings running far deeper still. The fortunes made here founded De Beers and shaped the region for a century.

The museum recreates the rush-era town with period buildings, restored exhibits, and a diamond display, and from the viewing platform you look out over the Big Hole itself. It makes a strong, human stop, the story of the people and the money behind the stones, before the landscapes take over again.

You return to the train for lunch, and it heads northeast toward the Highveld, the open grassland plateau that fills the interior of the country. Tea is served in the observation car as the wide country rolls by, and dinner is formal as the journey continues across the plains into the evening. By the time you turn in, the train is well up onto the Highveld, with the gold country and the run into the Pretoria area ahead the following morning, the last of the trip.

A final, unhurried breakfast as the train makes its way north across the Highveld toward Meyerton, through the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, the gold-bearing reef that built Johannesburg and modern South Africa.

The train arrives at Meyerton Station, around a hundred kilometres south of Rovos Rail’s private station in Pretoria, where the journey ends. From here there is an optional complimentary transfer of about ninety minutes up to the Rovos station in Pretoria, where you can also see the locomotives, the workshops, and the small railway museum if you have the time; allow around ninety minutes to take those in.

From Pretoria you continue to your onward arrangements. Pretoria and neighbouring Johannesburg sit at the heart of Gauteng, with the country’s main international airport between them, so the run makes an easy end to a trip or a starting point for onward travel, whether north to the Kruger and the Lowveld or further afield. After two nights crossing the country from the Cape, the Highveld is a practical and central place to finish.