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Article snippet: I awoke sometime before dawn to the soft, rhythmic clacking of the train, pacing steadily through the heart of South Africa. Poking my face out of the window to take in a breath of cool, dry spring air, I could see stars behind the blue-black shadows of the passing trees. We were somewhere past Kimberley, the Northern Cape Province city where Cecil Rhodes had famously — or, rather, infamously — made a fortune mining diamonds more than a century ago. I remembered a conversation I had earlier that day with Hendrick Stander, an employee of the Shosholoza Meyl train I was riding from Johannesburg to Cape Town, who told me why he fell in love with train travel as a child: “I loved the click-clack, click-clack.” My train journey between the two South African cities would take 26 hours and cover nearly 1,000 miles before reaching its terminus in Cape Town railway station on the coast. Besides tapping into a new found love of train travel, my trip on the Shosholoza Meyl Premier Classe provided the ultimate in affordable luxury: For 3,120 rand (plus a 75-rand booking fee, for a total of about $235), I had my own air-conditioned sleeper compartment, a shower and a proper dining car serving multicourse meals. And, of course, there were a multitude of vistas, from the grassy, steppe-like plateau in the heart of the country to the craggy Hex River Mountains in the southwest. I had a couple of days in Johannesburg leading up to my train trip, and I was going to make the most o... Link to the full article to read more