FOR any world cup reveller exploring beyond the magnificent new football stadia in South Africa, be prepared for strange, savage events.

For instance a few miles from the futuristic Green Point stadium in Cape Town you may find yourself in my hometown of Muizenberg, one of the many white-beached settlements on the coastal rail link between there and the naval port of Simonstown, each of them with their own personal peak among many in the rolling Drakensberg range.

Just below the striated burl of Muizenberg mountain is Main Road and on it is a sweet shop and fruiterers dubbed Porto Bello. Walk three steps beyond the store towards the Atlantic and horror always strikes.

It happened to me, to my brother, to my son, to my friends. Always. Same place. Same event. Same scream.

Out of the blue comes an explosive winged whirr and heavy thump as a four-inch-long, purple-headed, scarlet-eyed locust lands on your chest. You yell and beat it off and it explodes again into furious flight veering back towards the mountain. And the fright-powered blood in your temples pounds a savage, primeval beat.

Let me explain and don’t scoff. This is both a message and a warning. Never mind the Panamanian name of the shop, the British colonial style architecture of the houses or the modern European cars whooshing along Main Road. You’re in Africa – and never forget it.

Step across the precise line of migratory flight that has been occurring for millions of years and expect to get thumped in the chest, chum.

Better locusts than the humans who reportedly thump you in the head with bullets from AK47s wielded by scallywag Tsotse gangs ready to murder for your fancy watch or even your not-so-fancy hire car. (Some Volkswagens and Toyota Corollas seem to be a favourite among the 60,000 car-jackings per year which result in 60 murders).

But do you know what? The perception of violence is greater than the reality. I lived there for decades during the even-worse apartheid years and survived, didn’t I? The democratic government claims violence is a serious problem but abating.

Can you believe that the Blue Flag Backpackers have been launched in the Cape Flats, that once-murderous string of poverty-infested settlements which no white driver risked traversing?

Violence is furthest from your mind as you stand God-like at Signal Hill’s summit watching below you tiny, puffy sun-bronzed clouds pumped by the steady south-easter through the narrow crook-arm between where you stand and Table Mountain to create the famous Tablecloth over the bay.

And what can be more enchanting than seeing the dinner-jacketed penguins at Boulders Beach guzzling shoaling fish? Or more moving than visiting Nelson Mandela’s tiny prison cell on barren Robben Island nine miles out to sea where he planned and later executed freedom for what was to become the Rainbow nation?

Or more fascinating than ostriches powerfully loping past your car on the way to Cape Point, that baboon-infested dividing line between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans? Or more exciting than standing in a Paarl vineyard, twirling the sharp winter sunshafts through a glass of Perelwyn?

You may be forced to fly the 1,000 miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg at steep prices for the matches in the Ellis Park and new Soccer City stadia, but don’t be daunted from hiring a car once you get there, however violent the reputation of iGoli, City of Gold.

A car is the only way to get out of that fierce and snarling skyscraper city where the worst excesses of Nazi-admiring white nationalists left their mark, in minority white chichi opulence of the swish shopping malls of Sandton contrasting with the majority black depravity a few miles away in the smoking sprawl of cardboard and corrugated townships like Crossroads, Katlehong and Tokoza.

How else but drive the two hours beyond the Magaliesberg range to Sun City, that loony casino temple of greed in the mouth of a barren volcano (to which so many black families were bussed by the police at gunpoint in the sad, bad days). And how else do you visit from there the small but wondrous Pilanesburg game reserve, which has the “big five” – enough to discover the dormant muscles that make your ears twitch on the downwind approach of a lion… Anyway, from Jo’burg it is also but an hour’s drive to Pretoria, known as the Jacaranda city but sadly ‘tis not the season for the trees’ mauve blossoms.

After the Loftus Versfield fixtures, you can always tour the Van Gaalen cheese-making farm, clinging to the Dutch traditions of South Africa’s first white settlers, or hop aboard the cableway overlooking the mighty Hartebeest-poort dam; or visit the Voortrekker Monument, that shrine to Afrikanerdom (where under glass the killed and stuffed carcases of Kalahari bushmen were once displayed but have since been given an honourable burial).

The 410 mile drive to sub-tropical Durban for fixtures in the Moses Mabhida stadium, is exhilarating – especially if you stop off at the Zulu battlefields within The Valley of a Thousand Hills or visit Ndotsheni in Kwazulu where in Alan Paton’s novel, Cry The Beloved Country, the hills were described as “beautiful beyond any singing of them.”

So never mind the violence said to threaten the World Cup. Simply breathe in the rainbow… and become an African.

That way you’ll watch your step and know exactly where to avoid the mountain locust sentries.