One must admire the sheer, brazen poetry of it. In a land where the very soil thrums with the ancient, untranslatable rhythms of life and death, where the horizon is still sliced by the silhouette of a thorn tree against a blood-orange sunset, the latest attraction to be unveiled is not a newly discovered cave painting or a rare, iridescent beetle. It is, of course, a piece of code. South Africa Tourism, with a flourish that would make any colonial administrator proud for its efficient mapping of terra incognita, has introduced Siyanda, touted as Africa’s first AI travel assistant. It promises to sculpt your ideal trip from the digital clay of data, offering real-time insights and personalised recommendations. One imagines it whispering, not of the scent of rain on the Karoo or the bone-deep silence of the bushveld at noon, but of optimised routing and dynamically priced lodge availability. The safari, it seems, has finally been streamlined.

This is not merely a convenient app; it is the logical endpoint of a global travel ethos that has been metastasising for years. We have progressed from dog-eared guidebooks to crowd-sourced review platforms, and now to the oracle of the algorithm. The goal is no longer to be surprised, but to be perfectly, efficiently catered to. Siyanda is merely the most poignant example, its digital birth on a continent so often lazily marketed as the last bastion of the ‘raw’ and ‘real’ is a delicious contradiction. It holds a mirror up to the modern traveller’s anxiety: the terror of a missed opportunity, of not having the *definitive

• experience. Why trust the capricious advice of a sun-leathered guide when an omnipotent, cloud-based entity can calculate, with cold precision, the exact probability of you seeing a leopard on a given Tuesday?

Recall the global pilgrimage to Iceland a few years prior, a landscape of such stark, theatrical beauty it seemed designed by a particularly moody deity. Yet, the experience for many became a procession from one geo-tagged, Instagram-validated waterfall to the next, a checklist executed with the grim determination of a consumer completing a loyalty card. The aurora borealis itself became a downloadable alert. Siyanda is the natural evolution of this, the internalisation of the digital concierge. It promises to free us from the drudgery of planning, yet in doing so, it risks scripting the entire adventure, replacing serendipity with a series of high-probability outcomes. The ‘personalised recommendation’ is, by its very algorithmic nature, a derivative of the aggregate. It will show you what you, and people statistically like you, have already been proven to enjoy. The path it charts is a well-trodden one, merely disguised as a secret trail.

There is a melancholic clarity in observing this. The world of travel becomes a vast, beautifully rendered diorama, and we are the perfectly managed specimens moving through it. Siyanda can doubtless tell you the best time to visit the Winelands for the light on the vineyards, or which township tour has the most favourable ethical ratings. It can synthesise the chaos of Johannesburg into a manageable, timed itinerary. But can it convey the visceral jolt of locking eyes with a bull elephant, an intelligence so vast and alien it seems to stop time? Can it prepare you for the sudden, humbling awareness of your own irrelevance in the face of the Drakensberg mountains? Its insights will be real-time, but its soul is timelessly, perpetually elsewhere.

This is not a Luddite’s plea to smash the servers. The utility is undeniable, especially in navigating logistics in a complex country. The irony, sharp and surgical, lies in the packaging. This tool of supreme control and curation is launched into a context sold on unpredictability and primal connection. It caters to the modern anxiety of wanting to have *fully experienced

• a place without ever truly being at its mercy. We wish to touch the wild, but with a sanitised hand and a guaranteed back-up plan.

Perhaps the true, unspoken function of such AIs is not to connect us more deeply with a destination, but to mediate our encounter with it, to insert a layer of benign software between our fragile sensibilities and the overwhelming, sometimes uncomfortable, reality of Elsewhere. It turns the journey into a consumable product, its edges smoothed, its surprises pre-vetted. The great, melancholic joke is that in seeking to showcase South Africa’s diverse attractions—from wildlife safaris to urban adventures—through a lens of flawless digital curation, we may be gently shepherded away from the very thing that makes them matter: their glorious, unscriptable, and profoundly human imperfection.

In the end, one might be tempted to ask Siyanda for a recommendation on where to find an experience it cannot possibly quantify. And then, quietly, switch it off.