Durban is South Africa's third-largest city and its warmest, sprawling along the Indian Ocean in the subtropical heart of KwaZulu-Natal. It's a beach town and a busy industrial port at the same time, and a place where Zulu, Indian, English and Afrikaans cultures live on top of one another in a way you don't quite see anywhere else in the country.
The defining stretch is the Golden Mile, a long arc of sand backed by promenade, hotels and apartment blocks. The water is warm enough to swim year-round, the surf at North Beach is good, and on weekends the whole beachfront fills up with families, swimmers and surfers. At the southern end, uShaka Marine World combines an aquarium, water park and dolphin shows in a half-day's worth of distraction. At the northern end, the Moses Mabhida Stadium arch lifts you above the city and the Suncoast Casino keeps the lights on after dark. North of the centre, Umhlanga is the fancier seaside suburb, with calmer beaches and the famous Umhlanga Lighthouse.
Inland from the beach lies the legacy of the indentured labourers brought from India in the 1860s to work the sugar fields. Durban's Indian community is the largest outside India, and you feel it everywhere. Around Grey Street (now Yusuf Dadoo) and the Victoria Street Market, the air smells of cardamom and roasted chickpeas, the Juma Masjid is the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere, and you can eat bunny chow — a hollowed-out half-loaf of bread filled with curry, invented here — for next to nothing. The curries in Durban are the best argument for visiting on their own.
Up the hill, the residential Berea has Victorian villas and jacarandas, the Durban Botanic Gardens shelter Wood's cycad (the loneliest plant in the world), and the Durban City Hall facing Francis Farewell Square houses the city's main art and natural-history museums. The CBD is a working African downtown — chaotic, lively, and not somewhere to wander after dark — while Morningside's Florida Road is the safe and lively eating-out strip. Durban's reputation for street crime is real; stick to the beachfront, the Berea suburbs, Florida Road and the northern beaches, and you will be fine. Get out of town for a day to the Valley of a Thousand Hills, the Inanda Heritage Route — Gandhi's Phoenix Settlement and Mandela's voting place at Ohlange — the Drakensberg, or the wildlife of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, and you have one of the best bases for exploring KwaZulu-Natal.