About XploreMzansi

Updated 15 October 2026

XploreMzansi is an independent travel guide to Southern Africa. We cover eight countries: South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. Each has destination guides, places to stay, airports, border crossings and the entry and health rules you need before you go.

Our story

XploreMzansi began as an idea in 2018: one guide to the region that a traveller could trust, with every fact checked and dated. The scope was large, so the first drafts stayed private for years. In 2026 we rebuilt the guide from the ground up and published it, starting with South Africa and its neighbours.

“Mzansi” is the Nguni Bantu word for South Africa. The guide started there and grew to cover the neighbours most trips also cross into.

How we make our guides

• Every fact has a source. Opening hours, fees, visa rules, distances and prices come from official or primary sources, such as government departments, park authorities and the places themselves. Each guide ends with a list of those sources.
• Facts that change are dated. Rules and prices change, so we show when we last checked them (“checked 8 October 2026”), and we update the date when we review a page.
• Ratings belong to their source. Where we mention a guest rating, we name where it comes from, for example Google or Booking.com, with the number of reviews. We list stays rated at least 4.0 out of 5 (or 8 out of 10) from ten or more reviews. We don’t publish ratings of our own.
• If we can’t verify something, we leave it out. We would rather publish a shorter page than guess a price, a distance or an opening time.
• Distances are calculated with OpenStreetMap’s route planner from the place’s coordinates, and we say so on the page.
• Photos are our own or come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, and every one is credited on the page and on our Photo credits page.
• We use AI tools to help find sources and draft pages. Every fact must trace back to a source we can link, and pages are checked against those sources before they go live.

Independence, advertising and affiliate links

No place pays to be listed or for what we say about it. We have no affiliate or paid partnerships yet. If we add affiliate links to booking sites, we will mark them, and a commission will never decide what we include. Details are on our Affiliate disclaimer page. The site may also show advertising, which is kept separate from the guides.

Corrections and contact

If something on the site is wrong or out of date, please tell us at [email protected] or through our contact page. We check every report against the source and correct the page, with a new “updated” date.