Driving through South Africa's picturesque interior is a life-affirming experience. Photos by D J Clark / for China Daily

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Driving between cities in the interior of South Africa, D J Clark discovers a land bathed in magical colors, with nary a hint of the violence associated with its cities.

South Africa is known primarily for its cities, beaches and wildlife parks, but there are also majestic landscapes that form the bulk of the interior.

Keen to discover them, I chose to drive rather than fly between cities.

Driving is easy. Most roads run in endless straight lines with mountains in the distance and huge skies above. At dusk, the birds gather and the clouds melt into warm splattered colors. It's a magical experience and at odds with the image of violent cities that everyone planning a trip here is warned of.

After picking up my car in Bloemfontein, in the middle of South Africa, I left the city just minutes after I had arrived, heading south west along the N1, South Africa's best-known highway, to the southern port of Cape Town.

I stopped at Richmond in the afternoon. Having found a place to sleep, I went out looking for string to tie up a broken suitcase.

Ling Feifei was the first of many characters I had brief encounters with during my trip.

The Chinese woman, in her early 20s, from Jilin province, was running a mid-sized convenience store with her boyfriend.

"String," I asked Ling, "do you have any string?"

She gave me the same puzzled look I get in Beijing when I speak English, so I tried Mandarin and was greeted with a stare as if I was from Mars. "It's the first time a customer has spoken Mandarin to me," she said.

Ling moved to Richmond two years ago from Jilin in Northeast China. She was three-and-a-half years into a law degree at Jilin University when her boyfriend persuaded her to give up her studies and follow him to seek a better life in Africa.

Richmond is a strange place - a relic of the apartheid era with a main street for the whites and black and colored communities living across the river.

"It's very different now," Johan Beziidenhoudt, a local farmer, told me as he picked up some supplies. The next evening he invited me out to his sheep farm, about an hour's drive along dirt roads.

Beziidenhoudt's family has run the farm for generations and saw the new South Africa as necessary progress but was frustrated with a dysfunctional local government which had little time for the needs of his family.

I was finding it hard to grasp the co-existence of Ling, a Chinese migrant in search of a better life, the people from Richmond's squatter camp where I had spent the afternoon taking pictures, and Beziidenhoudt's family living in a small community in the middle of a semi-desert.

The next day I continued to drive, through vast canyons of steep rock faces, past ostrich farms and empty brown fields with just a few cactus plants.

I drove all day and nearly ran out of fuel, forgetting a golden rule in these parts - if you see a petrol station, fill up. As night approached, once again the skies turned red but this time the clouds came down to cover the rocky hills like a blanket.

As the car started to stutter I reached De Rust and its choice of two filling stations. It was there that I stopped once more in a comfortable guesthouse that seems so easy to find outside of the peak season.

After a strange egg and mince combination breakfast and some incomprehensible directions from a hung-over Yorkshire man I took off for the final push to Cape Town.

As I neared, the fields became more fertile and the rivers widened but it remained a pleasant drive. Approaching the coast the sky once more turned red and welcomed me into the historic port city I had heard so much about but never visited.

With only one day to see all that Cape Town had to offer, I started with a morning run along the beach followed by a dip in the icy waters of the South Atlantic Ocean.

Shark warning signs gave me an excuse not to stay too long in the water and I headed back to my lodgings for breakfast.

I missed the downtown area but instead drove to the Constantia vineyards to get an inside view of how some of my favorite wines were made.

With the taste of the wine on my lips, the warm afternoon inspired me to go back to the beach for a walk on the sands before a final drive around the coast as the sun began to go down in the horizon.

Driving to the airport the next morning I stopped one last time at a viewpoint to get a picture of the mountains.

I wondered if Ling had made the right choice to move to the small desert town. I guess I will have to return one day to find out.