If you are going on another license, you need to do a small conversion - the Air Law exam and a flight test, but you would have to do that almost anywhere. Find a school that can do the paperwork part in advance as it needs to go to the SACAA first before you can fly and that can all be sorted before you arrive -a decent school will let you know exactly what needs to be done and how much it costs, or do a google search for "Higherplane" there is some info about flying in SA on that site, and Irv Lee, the site owner can advise you on the license conversion process - his email is on his website.
The flying over there is good. Nice weather and great scenery, but make sure your nav is spot on - there are some very remote and lonely places there and also some parts where you cannot raise anyone on the radio without doing a relay via a passing airliner !!. They tend to use 1:1,000,000 charts over there, so nav can be a bit tricky as the charts don't show much detail covering such a huge area and they are also not laminated either which is a pain in the @$$.
Also if you don't know how to do density calculations on the CRP-5, learn. There are some very high airfields in SA, and it gets very hot. Hour building SEP spam cans don't like that and you may find yourself not getting off the ground - especially if you tried to take off with the mixture fully rich !!. (remember the pre-take off checks - it is NOT just simply "Mixture - Rich".....as taught at a hell of a lot of flight schools
- it's "Mixture -
Set (rich for SEA LEVEL)")
Make sure you use a well established school/club with a good reputation, like anywhere else SA has its fair share of rouges - I used to fly with Algoa at Port Elizabeth, although APTRAC also at PE, Progress just outside PE and 43rd Air School at Port Alfred are all well known reputable companies. I'm not too clues up about schools in other parts of the country, but do a search on google then cross reference the names on here and it should pull up any threads.
A/c hire over there was around 1/2 what I was paying in the UK. The beer worked out at £0.80 a bottle, and food is pretty cheap too - even in the classy upmarket joints, it can be within your budget if your used to European prices.
Hope that helps. Any questions feel free to PM and I'll try and answer them as best I can.
