The first music I remember hearing, back when Pete Seeger was still learning chords, was my parents’ shellac 78s of two Afrikaaner folksingers, Josef Marais and his wife, Miranda. They sang of the Stellenbosch boys and marching to Pretoria, of Bulu the Zulu and the train to Kimberley. I grew up thinking of South Africa as unimaginably exotic.

It took me most of a lifetime to get there, and when I finally did, I found a country less exotic than in my childhood imaginings, yet lovely, delightful, and increasingly being discovered by travelers adventuresome enough to spend the 15 hours in the air required to get there. There’s no doubt that South Africa is a nation finding its way in the face of daunting political and social challenges, but it’s also a friendly place, particularly if you’re driving the most exciting sedan on the planet, a stunning silver $230,000 450-horsepower twin-turbo Bentley Arnage T.

Day 1: 276 Miles —Cape Town to Paarl via the wine country

Cape Town is on everyone’s shortlist for the world’s most beautiful city, and for good reason. With the Atlantic at its feet and mountains rising at its back, the place is a stunner. But its busy cobbled streets are no place to put the Bentley through its paces, so I aim northwest of the city to wine country, in search of endless miles of open road. The oh-so-British Bentley has a classic starter button: Turn the key, and then, just as on the jets I used to fly, tap the button once and let the car’s reliable electronic wizardry do the rest. Rumble-rumble goes the truck-huge, hand-assembled, aluminum V-8, as the needles on the display of old-fashioned round gauges (more numerous than anything this side of a Cessna) all stand at attention and salute on the dashboard.

The air is crystalline, everything stunningly visible for miles and miles, the mountains so sharp and distinct in their stratification that you feel you’re looking straight into the earth. Uneroded, they seem to have just arrived at the surface.

In the deep valleys, vineyards are everywhere, and the end of each row of vines is full-stopped by the punctuation of a bunch of bright marigolds. (The flowers are like canaries in a coal mine: If they die, the vines, untreated, will be the next to go.) Paarl, Franschhoek, and Stellenbosch are the core of a wine region that has existed for three centuries, though South African wines are still a novelty in mainstream America. Even Napoleon had a favorite South African wine, though he had to go a little farther than the corner liquor store to find it.

On the R45 southbound from Franschhoek, the big Bentley climbs a corniche-like road over the Franschhoekberg Range, and the valley far below is filled with prosperity. It’s a stark contrast to the sight of the millions of squatters who fill the enormous shantytowns not far away, nearer Cape Town, living in huts of plastic sheeting, rusty corrugated metal, and crude boards.

It’s just one of the endless extremes that South Africa presents to me: shantytowns on the one hand and, on the other, the luxury encampment at Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, high above blue-water Walker Bay. People come here to watch for whales, peering out to sea in hopes of catching a glimpse of one, only to finally realize that the slick, sea-washed boulders below are in fact the very beasts themselves, parallel parked in pairs.

Grootbos is tucked into a paradisiacal hillside that in California would be strewn with houses, but here is 2,500 acres of well-conserved, thousand-year-old milkwood forest and gardens. There are more than a thousand imported and native varieties of floral plants and, in the center of it all, a lodge where 26 guests are ministered to by a staff of 38 in spectacularly sited guest rooms and suites (www.grootbos .com; 27-28-3840381).

The road along the Atlantic shore—the R326 past Hermanus and then the R44 to Strand—is walled by bouldery mountainsides landward and a rocky, nearly beachless shore. It is the height of the Southern Hemisphere summer, but the one long crescent of smooth sand that I see has only a single beach umbrella and perhaps a dozen sunbathers. That penguins can often be seen in these waters should tell you enough about the temperature. That it’s a favorite haunt of great white sharks should offer further discouragement, though being lowered among them in steel-barred cages is an increasingly popular activity in these waters. Some here aren’t amused by what they see as teaching sharks that people in wet suits are bait. Go figure.

Day 2: 325 Miles —Paarl to Mossel Bay via the Cango Caves

South Africa’s best-known great drive is the Garden Route, the N2 along the beautiful but populous south-central tourist shore. I’ve had enough of coastal communities that don’t seem very far removed from Malibu or Cape Cod, and opt instead for the intensity of the inland emptiness—the R60 and R62 through the semi-desert Karoo. Along these hundreds of thousands of square miles of scrubland, ocher earth, and treeless hills, I can let the Bentley have its head on the smooth, traffic-free two-lanes.

At one point, I get the Arnage up to an indicated 158 miles per hour. There’s said to be another 10 miles per hour under the hood of this, the fastest four-door sedan ever put into production, but realizing that I’m probably an hour from even the nearest medevac helicopter, I back out of the throttle to a more reasonable 120.

South Africa’s outback is a land like no other; I can find no comparison for this primitive, otherworldly emptiness. In the middle of nowhere, a tiny girl walks barefoot with her mother in the flinders beside the highway, her stubby steps taking her . . . where? In the rearview mirror, I see them turn and stare at the fleeing Bentley, an apparition that must seem as unlikely as somebody doing touch-and-goes at the local airport in their own 747 would to us. In South Africa, where half a rand is considered a good tip for a gas station windshield washer, the Arnage T would sell for 2,530,000 of them. Still, roadside workers and field hands riding in the back of pickup trucks wave as I pass, and whenever I stop for gas and admit to the inevitable crowd that the Bentley vastly exceeds my own aspirations as well, the car becomes the subject of incomprehension and hilarity.

The Cango Caves, north of Oudtshoorn, are a stunning example of how questionable taste and motives can compromise even the most monumental works of nature. Yet the caverns are so magnificent that not even the poured-concrete floors and tiered artificial amphitheaters, the colored floodlights and canned, yappy commentary of the guides can entirely spoil the experience. The limestone formations are so varied and colorful that you’d almost think them papier-mâché Disney constructs.

At Mossel Bay, I give a ride to a young man who jumps into the Bentley with glee to show me the way to my hotel’s gated little parking lot, where the big sedan shoulders its way into two spaces.“Are you from London?” he asks.

“No, New York.”

“Ah!” he says. “Zero ground!” and shakes my hand vigorously.

Day 3: 312 Miles —Mossel Bay to Paarl via the southernmost point in Africa

In the 1970s, three-quarters of South Africa’s gross national product came from its natural resources, mainly mining. Today, those famous diamond and precious-metals veins produce only a quarter of the GNP, and tourism is the fastest-growing industry. But there’s a nagging and very real problem: South Africa is more than a bit dangerous, and if anything, it’s getting worse. “This is a beautiful place, but bad things happen here,” says my acquaintance James Lamont, the Financial Times’s Cape Town reporter. “People here see wealthy musicians and athletes on TV and become terribly aspirational about the American way of life. ‘How do I do that here?’ they ask themselves.”

They do it by carjacking, robberies, and burglaries. Still, it’s mainly the residents who feel the brunt of the lawlessness. The basic rules for tourists in Cape Town are the same as in most foreign cities: Don’t walk anywhere at night, and don’t carry or wear anything you don’t want taken.

Factoid one: In South Africa, traffic lights are called robots, so prepare to be told to turn left at the third robot.

Factoid two: Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. I see the enormous birds everywhere, usually mistaking them for cows, since their bodies are bovine fat and long and their skinny legs and necks are hard to make out from a distance. They run like fussy ballerinas, and when they do try to hide, they hunker down with their necks and heads stretched out flat on the ground. It probably works just as well as burying them.

The N2 toward Swellendam is yet another fine South African road, and the morning fog off the Indian Ocean burns clear to reveal the Langeberg, more craggy and elemental mountains, some still wreathed in the thinning mist. Ahead, a highway patrolman pulls well over onto the verge to let the intimidating Bentley thunder by.

Bredasdorp is the site of the poignant Shipwreck Museum. A display here shows all of the area’s capes, from Good Hope eastward—Hangklip, Danger Point, Quoin, Struis, Infanta, and others—and to each is appended a list of foundered vessels. Some of the columns are 30 names long, and the sinkings range from the mid-eighteenth century to as recently as 1974. There’s a skull from the mass grave of the Arniston’s 372 victims, a display case commemorating the Birkenhead’s 445, and on and on—transportation disasters to rival any in the twentieth century.

One of the fatal capes is Agulhas. It’s a long, straight, high-speed run down the R319—where cranes nest atop electric poles and signs warn you to be careful of the turtles—to the point of land that is closer to Antarctica than anything else in Africa. In fact, it wasn’t the Cape of Good Hope that mariners had to round on their way to the Orient but Agulhas, where you can put one foot in the Atlantic and the other in the Indian Ocean. I didn’t, but I did wonder what storm-battered Portuguese or Royal Navy sailors might have thought if they’d crawled ashore through the surf and found the launderettes, superettes, and B&Bs of the multipasteled vacation community that has taken over the bluff, rocky headland.

Homebound on the R316 and the N2, there’s one last spectacle: the sweeping view from Sir Lowry’s Pass, where far below the entire stretch of beach towns, from Gordon’s Bay all the way to the distant Cape of Good Hope, lies like a precise architectural model. It hasn’t been a drive for the are-we-there-yet set, but for anyone who loves the capability of a true grand-touring machine and who needs the perfect roads on which to set one loose, South Africa is the place to play.

Pit Stops

Mossel Bay Sometimes, three stars are enough. The Old Post Office Tree Manor may not have air-conditioning or a minibar, but the ceiling fan works fine, the location is primo, and the price is right: A night at the Manor cost us less than $45, in a double room overlooking the harbor, with the Indian Ocean beyond (27-44-691-3738; www.oldposttree.co.za).

Paarl The Grande Roche Hotel is a spectacularly luxurious restored eighteenth-century farm. Rates range from $123 for a double to $300 for a duplex suite (27-21-863-2727; www.granderoche.co.za).