My worry is whether or not they are planning to write about their experiences. The HEA’s very understandable worry is whether or not they are using condoms. ACCORDING TO research from the Health Education Authority, one in six “young and single Britons” will have a sexual encounter with a new partner while abroad. Meals seldom cost more than pounds 6 per person, including a bottle of good local wine.. A wide range of packages, including tailor-made itineraries, is offered by Southern Africa Travel, Guardian House, Borough Road, Godalming, Surrey GU7 2AE (tel:01483 419133).FOOD AND DRINKSouth Africa is excellent value. South African Airways (tel: 0171-312 5000, or 0161-834 4436 for the north of England, Scotland and Ireland).WHERE TO STAYHotels in the Karoo area start from around pounds 18 per person for b&b.

Return flights from London to Cape Town cost from pounds 581. Return flights from London to Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth, with an option of returning from Cape Town, plus seven days’ car rental, cost from pounds 830. So we shall not forget.”FACT FILEKAROOHOW TO GET THEREJuliet Clough travelled courtesy of South African Airways and Southern Africa Travel. If the Karoo was a literary landscape, then here we found an echo of EF Benson. Every second garden sprouted a lady in gloves, painting a watercolour, or a gentleman pruning the roses.At Mimosa Lodge, a culinary star in a constellation of excellent guest houses, we spotted a comment in the visitors’ book from a couple we knew “Unforgettable. A decanter of the local muscadet, left in our Montagu bedroom, just suited the mellow flavour of our last Karoo evening.Hemmed in by mountains and apricot orchards, Montagu preserved its clutch of pretty Cape Dutch houses like a wax bouquet under a glass dome.

We sat instead in a garden full of lemon trees, drinking sauvignon blanc and listening to cockcrow and the church clock chiming the quarters.Vineyards lined the road between Calitzdorp and Robinson, a taste of the grown-up wine routes lying ahead, around Franschhoek and Stellenbosch. “Weren’t you terrified?” I asked my husband after he had negotiated the 1,000m, roller-coaster descent into the Little Karoo “No. But I was scared of becoming scared.”Throughout the Little Karoo’s 350km length, broken patches of green spread towards rumpled hills, promising an end to the desert. Piled into donkey carts, black families trundled home from the fields to sleepy hamlets.”Calitzdorp is rife with culture” a local brochure assured us, but, somehow, seeking it out seemed too much like work. Sandstone layers heaved thousands of feet skywards and buckled into pink and grey swirls, loomed over, then under the narrow, untarred road. Conversation faltered as hairpin bends grew ever more fearsome.

The Meiringspoort approach proved a mere taster: Scotland with ostriches.But the 1,585m Swartberg Pass was a surfer’s drive. The view from the front closed with a building of similar elegance; Reinet House was home through most of the 19th century to the celebrated Scots minister, Andrew Murray, who must have found its broad yellow-wood floors and cool, high ceilings a far cry from the rigours of the average Aberdeenshire manse.If anyone had warned me about the Swartberg Pass, I might still be cowering on the far side. “What, on Sunday?” said a restaurant owner when we tried to book for dinner.The 200-year old Drostdy, a hotel of real class, provided the most comfortable, stylish retreat of the trip. Built as the town magistrate’s house, on generous Cape Dutch lines, it accommodated most of its guests in a cobbled lane of prettified former slave quarters.