The journey begins at Durban Station at ten in the morning. Durban is South Africa’s main Indian Ocean port, warm through most of the year, with long beaches, a large and long-settled Indian South African community and the food culture that comes with it. The train climbs out of the city into the hills, and the Valley of a Thousand Hills opens up, the rolling Zulu heartland along the Umgeni River folding away in ridge after ridge. There is time to settle into your suite and find the lounge and observation cars over lunch as the line works inland.

In the afternoon you disembark for a visit to Ardmore, the ceramics studio and gallery founded in 1985 by Fée Halsted, where local artists make vivid, sculptural ceramics that draw on the natural world and Zulu storytelling. The work is distinctive and widely collected, and the studio has become one of the better-known names in South African art.

Dinner tonight is formal, as the evenings are on Rovos, and the kitchen is genuinely good, so it is worth leaning into. As you dine, the train heads toward Ladysmith through the battlefields country: shortly after Frere, a memorial marks the spot where Winston Churchill, then a war correspondent, was captured by Boer forces in 1899 after they ambushed an armoured train. By the time you turn in, the train is well into the war country of northern KwaZulu-Natal, with a battlefield and a game drive ahead.

An early breakfast, then a short transfer to Spionkop Lodge for the morning, with a choice of two excursions. The battlefield tour tells the story of the Battle of Spioenkop in January 1900, one of the hardest-fought engagements of the Second Anglo-Boer War; among the men present in the wider campaign were a young Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi serving as a stretcher-bearer, and the Boer commander Louis Botha, which gives the site an unusual place in history. The alternative is a guided game drive in the eleven-thousand-acre Spioenkop reserve.

You return to the train for lunch. The country here is the high, broken uplands of KwaZulu-Natal, with the main wall of the Drakensberg rising away to the west of the line rather than along it. In the afternoon there is a game drive in the Nambiti Private Game Reserve, a Big Five reserve of around twenty thousand acres of malaria-free bushveld, where the mix of savannah, grassland, thornveld, and acacia supports elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and plenty of plains game and birdlife.

Dinner is formal as the train heads on for the night. The war history runs alongside the line into the evening: it passes Glencoe, near Dundee and Talana Hill, where the first major battle of the Second Anglo-Boer War was fought in 1899, and Newcastle, a town with a long-established Indian South African community and a notable Hindu temple, before descending from Majuba Hill, the site of the decisive battle that ended the First Anglo-Boer War in 1881.

Breakfast is served as the train runs northwest across the goldfields of the Witwatersrand and the open grasslands of the Highveld. The route passes through Heidelberg, which had its own gold rush in the 1880s, and on past Balfour, the green coast and the battlefields now behind you and the high inland plateau opening out ahead. After the variety of the first two days, this final morning is a quieter one, given over to the train itself and the wide Highveld country rolling by.

A last lunch is served on board, one more turn of the kitchen and the service that define a journey of this kind, before the run into the capital.

The train reaches Rovos Rail’s private station in Pretoria in the afternoon, where the journey ends. Pretoria is one of South Africa’s three capitals, set in the warmer bushveld north of Johannesburg and known for the jacarandas that line its streets in spring, and it is the home base for most of the Rovos journeys, so it makes a natural place to begin a longer trip on the train or to head on to the nearby airport for onward travel.