This article on The BBC reports on a survey of their readers conducted by The Telegraph, which concluded that South Africa is the best country in the world to visit. I beg to differ.

The article waxes lyrical about Cape Town, which is indeed a great destination, but is not representative of the whole country. I have been to South Africa quite a few times; I have friends and family there.

There is a huge number of problems in South Africa, for example:

• Cape Town recently had an enormous problem with water supply, now resolved; not the kind of thing you want at your vacation destination.
• Police corruption, including police road blocks simply to elicit bribes from drivers; a friend was stopped every day for months on her drive to take her child to school, and had to pay to avoid lengthy stops and vehicle searches.
• An epidemic of carjacking, sometimes by people pretending to be police officers; this is so bad that standard advice is, if a "police officer" attempts to stop you, is to drive to the nearest police station to report the incident; carjacking is also often done through fake accidents, where one of the gang jumps in front of a car, and when the driver stops, a whole gang jumps out of the bushes with clubs and machetes, robs the driver and steals the car, sometimes killing the driver; stopping at traffic lights is also dangerous at night, since a gang may also come out of hiding and rob and kill the driver.
• An ongoing issue of killing of white farmers in order to steal their land and livestock; farmers in some regions are selling up and even leaving the country.
• Electricity supply problems, with regular (as in every day, for hours, on a published schedule) black-outs and brown-outs.
• Violence on the streets; the drivers of the minivan "taxis" (the so-called kafer taxis) usually carry an AK-47 machine gun, and there are regular outbreaks of turf wars between different kafer taxi companies; most public transport (busses and trains) are unsafe.
• There are constant break-ins and home invasions; most affluent homes have at least one gun, professionally trained guard dogs, and signs notifying potential burglars that the homeowner has an armed response security service; victims are often injured and even killed during break-ins.

Constant infrastructure thefts (telephone/Internet cables, railway tracks and even whole railway stations).

Most of these problems have been gong on for decades, and show no signs of being fixed.

Do you still want to go to South Africa? If so, I suggest Cape Town. I also recommend that you only go if you have friends there with whom you can stay, and who can teach you how to stay safe.