Family travel in SA

We hope to spend 1 month in SA during February. We'd like to stay in a long term let and use that as our base for the month. We have a 4 year old and 15 month old. Does anyone have recommendations on where is a good place to stay? We are thinking somewhere on the garden route that is safe for young ones. Any recommendations on acommodation sites worth visiting would be great as well as any other tips on youngster friendly things to do in SA.

I don't think you can go far wrong with Rooms For Africa (http://www.roomsforafrica.com) It's the booking site I use when traveling around South Africa. It's very comprehensive and lists accommodation from hotels, to self-catering and longer term vacation lets.

Family Travel would be a wonderful in South Africa! There are many tourist attractions to enjoy

South Africa is a wonderful family vacation spot. You will get flexibility of hiring your own car and planning your own trip. All budgets are provided for and there's outstanding friendly accommodation which accept children of all ages. Most hotels are having swimming pools there are even wineries like Spier, with ample to keep amused the children while you enjoy some world-class vintages.

An ideal family vacation to South Africa would include Cape Town (city) where you can swim with penguins, visit the aquarium, experience the townships, and ride a cable car to the top of Table Mountain. The Garden Route is filled with exceptional beaches, a monkey sanctuary, Cango caves, ostrich farms and much more.

I know this is too late for the first poster, but in case anyone else is interested, for family holidays, make sure you grill the car hire company about whether they have seat belts in the back. Most of the cheap ones do not provide this, and the risk of serious injury if being catapulted from the back seat through to the front of the car is just as much in South Africa as it is anywhere else. Hire companies here tend to ignore such things and brag about their boot space instead. Honestly, I´d much rather my kids stay healthy and safe than carry around lots of extra luggage

I have been travelling frequently to South Africa for 15 years to the western, eastern and northern cape. Don't kid yourself. This is an extremely dangerous country to travel in, unless you have been schooled by an Afrikaans. I have been robbed on the street in Cape Town. I had a business acquaintance in Cape Town who was murdered in a car hijacking near the airport, despite his knowledge of the security situation, and several years ago, a lady who was a professor at the University of Cape Town was murdered on her own property in the peaceful community of Wellington, not far from Paarl. In November when I was in Plettenburg Bay (a resort community on the Garden Route), a white teenage holiday-goer who was celebrating his graduation was attacked brutally, robbed and beaten within an inch of his life.

There are rules of thumb you must follow everywhere in South Africa, every day, to protect yourself.

The murder rate for the whole country is quite high and most of the people who die are non-whites who are killed in their own all, black communities (townships). The western cape is among the safest regions in South Africa. But what one has to protect ones self in relatively safe areas are very low probability, random extreme acts of violence when you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Using personal security rules of thumb, and knowing what places are not safe, you can avoid all but the rarest tragedies.

Driving a rental car, especially long distances, in South Africa has its own special rules.