TO START with, full disclosure. In a kind of neat karmic payback for the years of wet and dreary Sundays spent in places like Semple Stadium and the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick, your correspondent was recently despatched to South Africa as a guest of the nice people from Slatterys, the first Irish tour operator to offer a regular direct service from Dublin to Cape Town. In the circumstances, and on the basis of hacks taking good care not to bite the hand that feeds, the reader is doubtless confident of a gushing summing-up at the end of the article, irrespective of the true facts; print the legend, etc. Well, we'll see? It's Sunday morning and you're at a jazz brunch in the courtyard of the Winchester Mansions Hotel on Atlantic Seaboard, a few minutes out of downtown Cape Town. A.

Jazz. Brunch. No, it's okay. Really. Granted, a jazz brunch is exactly the kind of thing you'd run a mile from at home (All those yuppies! All that smugness! All the talk of house prices! ), but out here it's different. There's a breakfast buffet and a lunch buffet and a glorious array of desserts, put together by a head chef who used to work in the Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin and presided over by Nils Heckscher, a jovial German. There's orange juice and endless coffee and the Sunday papers. There's a jazz group with a French singer going through the standards.

And there's champagne, which slips down very nicely at 10.30am under South African summer skies. "Look at one another while you're toasting, " Nils encourages. "Otherwise, seven years' bad sex." Part of you wonders what the downside of this is supposed to be. Your inner sociologist, meanwhile, is intrigued to notice a number of non-whites, members of the emerging black middle class, among your fellow brunchers. "Music, " as Nils puts it, "is a great transformer."

It's afternoon on a golf course near Cape Town. Any golf course near Cape Town, there being 28 to choose from. Over to Ian Kennedy, golf sales manager at the Arabella Western Cape Hotel and Spa. "We're continually opening up world-class golf facilities in South Africa. They're value for money and the climate is so good you can literally play in a shirt and shorts practically 365 days of the year, " asserts Kennedy, who encountered Irish golfers Graeme McDowell, Keith Nolan and Richie Coughlan during his time on the college circuit in the US. As a bonus, Kennedy adds, one occasionally has to shout "fore!" at passing giraffes on the fairway.

You're not sure whether he's joking or not.

Oh yes, value for money. It's nighttime in the town of Hermanus, an hour from Cape Town, and Cubana's Latino café is hopping, a DJ playing bangin' choons and the barmen doing their Tom-Cruise-in-Cocktail thing behind the counter. When it comes to propounding the case for the mileage for one's euro to be had in South Africa, this night constitutes Exhibit A. Total damage for seven main courses, two side orders, 12 beers, three Red Bulls, eight cocktails and one round of shots with exotic names - even if you've a vague notion that far more than one round of shots with exotic names was consumed - comes to R929.50, or about Euro14 per head. You actually laugh out loud. Later in the week you meet a local with a bad case of the shakes and a faraway look in his eye. He's just back from a holiday in Ireland, where he and his wife, in the way of tourists, ate out every night. He loved the country. He didn't love the prices. Hence the shakes and the faraway look.

It's one of several days out with Andre, the engaging and almost absurdly knowledgeable guide from Slatterys. To the pretty university town of Stellenbosch in the Winelands. To the magnificent Kirstenbosch national botanical gardens, a Unesco World Heritage Site. To the penguins at Betty's Bay, the baboons on the Cape Peninsula and the tempest-tossed majesty of Cape Point, scene of many a shipwreck over the centuries. To - most dramatic of all - the top of Table Mountain via the revolving cable car, there to look back down at the city stretched out on a carpet beneath you. Now this is what's called a spectacular view. On a clear day you'd be forgiven for thinking you can see forever.

It's time to eat. You've done little else in South Africa and you've done it very well.

The springbok (think venison) is terrific, the ostrich (leaner but equally tender; think beef for metrosexuals) only slightly less so.

With an ocean on either side, the seafood can only be fantastic - and is. Drinkwise, indigenous Pinotage is the pride and joy of the South African wine industry while Windhoek, from neighbouring Namibia, is the bottled beer of choice. Come the end of the week, you've eaten so well and so cheaply that you're yearning for a simple slice of bread and jam; Kavanagh's line about penitential dry bread and sugarless tea has never seemed more apt. Certainly there'll be no more crème brulée for you for a year, matey. Your friend from Shannonside does not sympathise. "Ah, FFS! I'm in bloody Moneygall, having a cold cup of tea and a Drifter. Wrist-slitting stuff." In an effort to hang onto the few pals you've got left, you decide to refrain from sending any more gloating text messages.

It's lunchtime and you're outside a restaurant on the pier in picture-postcard Simon's Town, the old British naval base, when along happen five gentlemen of leisure decked out in coloured smocks. They're panhandlers, but panhandlers with class; they will, literally, sing for their supper, or perhaps their afternoon's refreshment. Ten or 20 rand from each of the visitors gets us a rendition of 'Homeless', a song familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Paul Simon (and who hasn't? ), followed by the South African national anthem. Nkosi, sikelel' iAfrika, Malupnakanyisw' udumo lwayo, Yizwa imithandazo yethu, Nkosi sikelela, sikelela.

(Lord, bless Africa, May her spirit rise high up, Hear thou our prayers, Lord bless us. ) It's simple, beautiful and affecting. You vow to root out your old vinyl copy of Graceland when you get home.

It's the Western Cape but it's also the world. The Brits were here, obviously, but not only them. The Winelands teem with examples of Dutch colonial architecture. The aforementioned Arabella Western Cape Hotel and Spa has a Bavarian flag at its gates and a German channel available on TV.

Over here there's a sign for Glengarriff Road, over there a sign for a village called Waterford. You wonder how many thousands of young men left these endless skies and dusty roads to go fight for their respective old countries in 1914 and 1939. You wonder, with a little shiver of sadness, why they couldn't have stayed put.

It's nearly time to leave and you decide that the interests of balance demand you make a few entries on the other side of the mental ledger. You didn't visit the so-called gangsters' paradise of Johannesburg, for instance, but you did see the shanty towns on either side of the road from Cape Town airport. You read about the political promises to halve poverty by 2014 and you thought, hmmm. Then again, it's only a decade since South Africa achieved democracy; you can think of another country - small, green, rainy, 6,000 miles away - that took over 70 years to get its act together in similar circumstances. With the number of arrivals to South Africa showing a 16% increase in the first half of last year and growing faster than anywhere in the world, you suspect that a successful World Cup in 2010 will lead to Cape Town and the Western Cape making the leap into tourism hyperspace.

Then you put on a jumper, board the plane and grit your teeth in anticipation of the flail of another Irish January.

As for that glowing encomium to Cape Town and the Western Cape mentioned at the beginning of the article, there isn't one.

The reader, having digested the intervening paragraphs, presumably copped on quite a while back that there isn't a need for one.

Nkosi, sikelel' iAfrika.

Enda McEvoy travelled to South Africa with Slatterys South Africa. Phone 066-7186210, www. slatterys. com