Certainly, South Africa is working furiously to transform itself from the closed and brutal apartheid society it was famous for up to the 1990s, into the garrulous and lively country it wants to be. The chaos of transformation is to be seen everywhere, especially in the frantic buildup to the 2010 World Cup.

At Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo Airport, the terminals offer tourists a glimpse of the nation’s unrivaled beauty, with images everywhere of elephants and lions, seascapes and mountain ranges. The check-in desks, unfortunately, tell a different story. Baggage still needs to be wrapped in film to keep it from being ransacked and thousands pack into a space meant for a few hundred every time a few international departures coincide.

Outside Johannesburg and Cape Town, the fear factor plummets, even though I spotted a sign on the road from Johannesburg to the mining city of Rustenburg reading, “Do not stop: beware carjackings.” Small impoverished townships dot the countryside, remnants of blacks being forced out of their homes and into places where they would not be seen by the ruling whites, and crime around these areas is high.

But the townships are no longer the hovels they once were. The tin roofs and walls still exist in some places, but more often than not they have been replaced by brick, and transformed into small, but permanent homes offering running water and electricity. Successive governments since apartheid collapsed have pumped vast sums of money into developing the townships.

In what was a township but is now the bustling, messy and garrulous city of Soweto a few miles from Johannesburg, the waiter Massi serves me a huge steak served with pap (maize meal), smiling as my female colleague chomps at a large piece of meat. “She is Ugimba, lady who likes to eat a lot,” he smiles, paying her the ultimate compliment.

Most residents of Soweto, the former home of South African giants Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, make the journey to Johannesburg every day to work, much of the time in businesses run by whites who still appear to hold the purse strings of the economy despite the end of apartheid almost 20 years ago.

It’s still a common sight to see black house servants walking with little white children, an uncomfortable reminder of South Africa’s racist past for some but not, apparently, for the servants’ employers.

Next June, all South Africans will welcome the world to their nation.

For vast majority of visitors, it’ll be the holiday of a lifetime. An unhappy few will fall victim to crimes that are a symbol of the country’s battle to overcome odds that once looked overwhelming but today don’t appear quite so daunting.

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