Climb seven new trails to the top of Table Mountain, hike the five-day Otter Trail, or swim with sharks off the coast of KZN - all without ever leaving your house and just about anywhere in the world.
This is thanks to the efforts of over 200 volunteers, who trekked through some of South Africa's most spectacular terrain lugging Google Street View's 18kg cameras on their backs.
Vast sections of the country's best attractions have been mapped by trekkers, who covered more than 900km on foot over 12 months.Landscapes including the Kruger National Park, Table Mountain, the Richtersveld and the Drakensberg were all captured via Google's Street View Trekker, a wearable backpack with a camera system on top.
Under Google's camera-lending programme, anyone can apply to borrow the technology to help the company map the planet.
The backpack has 15 cameras and takes a full panoramic photo every 2.5 seconds, roughly one photo per step taken by the wearer. Software stitches the images together to create one image.Interactive technology then lets the user access an image and move in any direction by clicking as if they are actually there - or click on a Google point of interest to leap elsewhere.
Drive South Africa, a Cape-Town-based travel company, applied to use the cameras in late 2015 and approval was given last year.
A year later, the result maps out 232 points of interest across all nine provinces, and includes six World Heritage sites...