Here's the slideshow from my recent weekend in Johannesburg...story to explain all the pictures is below! You can also expand the slideshow to full screen (and get captions by doing so)
Last weekend, we wanted to travel again. We, in this case, are the three of us interning at the UN for the summer: me (the American studying at Princeton), Lauren (the Canadian studying at Columbia), and Ian (the Brit studying at Harvard). We have become something like a Three Ivy League International Intern Musketeers Trio. This time, we went even bigger than Rhino Sanctuary Weekend—we decided to go to the Gold City: Johannesburg, South Africa…and we decided to road trip it.
The first decision was who would drive. Lauren was not yet 25, so she was out. After much persistence, I won the battle. I really wanted to try driving on the wrong (aka, left) side of the road, and was the only one with experience driving in African countries (the Tichka pass and Marrakech in the Maghreb definitely count for something). And I reserved the car. The man at Budget Rent-a-Car was slightly confused that the male in the group would not be driving (or at least signing onto the registered drivers), so I guess you could say that’s another reason I wanted to drive—yes, girls can drive manual transmission cars too.
Driving in a car that is completely backward from what your brain expects is not easy. You go to the wrong side of the car to get into the driver’s seat. You switch on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal. You don’t think of the right-hand lane as the fast lane. It’s just automatic. However, some things were not backward (thank god): the gear shift moves in the same order, and the clutch, brake, and acceleration pads were in the same place. At least my feet didn’t have to think backwards. I was most glad to have a Brit along for the ride though, who so kindly (sometimes frantically) cautioned me if I was planning to turn into the right-hand lane. In my defense, I only attempted such mistaken actions if there was no other traffic around.
The Friday evening drive itself was fairly uneventful—no animals attempting to cross the road in the dark, which we had been warned about by our trusty Lonely Planet. The hardest part was figuring how to get out of Gaborone. There were lots of trucks on the road, and we saw a few funerals going on as the sun was setting (a sober reminder that we were traveling the infamous high-HIV transmission trucking corridor). We listened to the local music CDs we’d picked up, stopped for some dinner in Zeerust, and I think over an hour of the trip was passed with Ian explaining the rules of that most complex sport, cricket. I now know what “the Ashes” an “over,” a “golden duck,” a “fast bowl,” “20/20” and a “wicket” are. I am sad to report, however, that they do not generally drink Pims at cricket matches. The only hitch of the drive down was when we briefly got lost and took the M1 rather than the N1 freeway on the way from Pretoria, and narrowly missed a semi-truck that was stalled in the middle lane of the highway with no lights or flares on. But we arrived at our CouchSurfing destination (a nice little apartment in Randburg) unscathed, and chatted up our host, John, for awhile before heading to bed.
In the morning, we woke up early so as to get to the Lion Park before the crowds. We were determined to get some quality time in playing with lion cubs, and didn’t want to have to share. The Cub World part of the experience was AWESOME. You can pet the lion cubs, just not on the head or tail, advice we didn’t try too hard to resist following (they’re cubs, but they have teeth!). One of them tried to eat my new Converse kickers, luckily, the trainer got his little jaws of shoelace death off in time. We also got to feed a giraffe, an animal which I have always felt my height gives me a certain kinship with. I just hope I am not as slobbery as a giraffe…those blue tongues produce a lot of saliva! Still, an awesome experience. I can’t say the rest of the Lion Park was that thrilling. Yes, we got to see lions and a cheetah and a leopard, and hyenas, but it felt somewhat like a zoo, since the animals were really just in giant cages. You know the tourists feed the lions too, since they jump up on the big safari trucks that drive around. We were in our own car, and kept the windows rolled UP…if there was a fight between a lion and our little VW Golf, I don’t know which would have won.
The next stop was the Apartheid Museum, but when we arrived, we learned there was no restaurant in the museum…and we were hungry! Lucky for us (unlucky for the sense of seriousness you would want to accompany an Apartheid Museum) the museum is adjacent to Gold Reef City, a theme park at the site where gold was discovered in Johannesburg back in the mid-1800s. And Gold Reef City is across a pedestrian bridge from a casino (yes, again, super tacky given the museum is there too), which has several restaurants inside. If there was an African-themed casino in Vegas, it would look like this: Golden elephants, gilded gazelles in the fountain outside…oh man. After our lunch, we decided we just couldn’t resist blowing a few rand on the slot machines. This turned out to be way too complex. You couldn’t just plug the machine with coins—you had to go buy a card for 10 rand ($1.50). This took us ten minutes to figure out. Then, the card doesn’t have money on it to begin with, but it acquires it as you win money. So we had to put another 10 rand in the bill slot to play. Maybe we won something, but I think we gambled when we shouldn’t have, and consequently lost it. We had no idea what we were doing and just pushed buttons at random. I’m sure this could be made into a dumb blonde-esque joke about “How many Ivy Leaguers does it take to play slots?” (Punchline: It doesn’t matter, they’ll still lose it all.) but we consoled ourselves with really good dipped ice cream cones to make up for it.
When we finally got to the museum, we stayed for a solid three hours. I think if I had not been there, the other two would have finished in two hours, but I got really into reading everything about Nelson Mandela’s life, and took my sweet time. The museum did an excellent job giving the history of Johannesburg (going back to the San “bushmen”), and had massive amounts of media and information on what it was like to live under apartheid for different races. It is mind-blowing to watch film clips of white South African politicians justifying segregation on the basis of racial superiority, and realizing this all ended less than 20 years ago—in my lifetime. The scars are certainly still present in society. I think the most difficult thing to experience was walking into the replication of the isolation prison cells that the apartheid government kept political prisoners (read: black activists) inside for long stretches of time. The feeling of claustrophobia was immense.
After the museum, we had an hour of daylight left, and decided to take a brief driving tour of the downtown (Central Business District, or CBD). As per travel book instructions, we kept the doors locked, and were definitely the only three white people around when we drove through bustling Hillbrow, which is part of the downtown that was abandoned by whites when apartheid ended. It felt a little bit uncomfortable when we got stuck in a minor traffic bottleneck near the taxi rank, but in general (and this feeling was true in general for the weekend), everyone we met was really friendly (though we did get some surprised looks when we were in predominantly black areas of town).
For those who know nothing about Johannesburg, the first thing you typically hear is just how dangerous it is. Crime rates are high, and all the information I’ve ever read about the city advises you to be highly aware of where you are and what time of day it is (after dark in many neighborhoods is not advisable). We read everything from “be prepared to run red lights if you see people lingering around stoplights to avoid car jacking” to “don’t wear earrings because they will get ripped out of your ears”. Even the travel magazine I read before leaving the States on “underrated destinations” that extolled the wonders of Jo’burg (and was perhaps a little over-glorifying) advised being cautious to avoid muggings. However, locals will tell you that the place is not as dangerous as it is made out to be, and considering over 5 million people make their home in the city, that’s probably also fairly accurate. So moral of the story is that you shouldn’t avoid Johannesburg based on what you read—yes there is crime, but there is crime everywhere, and if you use common sense, you will probably come out of the city with nothing remarkable having happened.
We had dinner in trendy Melville with our host, John. I had ostrich spring rolls and tasty kingklip fish (which I’m told is only found around South Africa). Top it all off with a dry South African sauvignon blanc, and it was delicious! We turned in early so as to get an early start for our second day of touring. In the morning, we returned to Hillbrow to check out Constitution Hill. This is the site of an old fort, and a former women’s prison (Mandela’s wife was imprisoned here for awhile). The Constitutional Court is behind the fort, which Mandela opened in 1993…no one was around, so we went up and sat in the chair where Nelson himself sat 16 years ago.
We wrapped up our time in Jozi with a driving tour of Soweto (an acronym for “South West Township,” which was started in the 1930s by blacks). We picked up the most delicious breakfast ever at a filling station…hot cross buns! This is not just a simple song on the piano—it is cinnamon-raisin filled doughy warm goodness. We ate a lot of them. Then we started driving. Soweto is, first and foremost, not a slum. Income levels vary widely, which is evident by the type of houses you see—there are very well-off neighborhoods, as well as much poorer sections of the township. The place is huge! We toured the Hector Pieterson museum, which pays tribute to the student uprising of June 16, 1976, where students in Soweto protested the forced use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the schools. Hector Pieterson was shot by police, and the museum is named in his honor. A few days later, the BCP (one of the Botswana political parties) was holding a rally in the Main Mall in Gaborone was honoring his death and the anniversary of the uprising. They were all wearing Che Guevara shirts—is the BCP the Botswana Communist Party? I should look into this.
We also toured Mandela’s house on Vilakazi street, and ate at a former shebeen (like a bar/restaurant) called Wandie’s. The traditional food was great—lots of meat, maizemeal, pumpkin, spinach, beets, and ice cream with fruit for dessert. I wish I’d had one of my new business cards to put with the countless others on the wall—instead we left a little note saying we’d been there. There was more to see in Soweto, but we needed to start heading back to Gabs to be at work in the morning. So we reluctantly left, and shot back up the freeway toward the border. Our timing was perfect too—unbeknownst to us, the border closes at 10 pm on Sundays…and we pulled into the border station at 9:59. After a weekend in Jozi, Gabs seems positively tame…but then again, Johannesburg has more than twice as many people as the entire country of Botswana. And following all the excitement of a Johannesburg weekend, I think that a relaxing one in Gabs is in store next time Friday rolls around.
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Well, daughter of mine, you are certainly adding to your reputation for living large! Thank you for letting me see another fascinating place through your eyes.
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