Johannesburg

By the time I arrived in Johannesburg, I had heard so many tales of muggings, carjackings and hold ups that I expected to be pounced on by masked bandits the moment I exited customs.  Against that background, my arrival was somewhat of an anti-climax.  Instead, I just found Solomon, the driver I had booked to pick me up, waiting patiently in the very sedate arrivals hall and holding a piece of paper bearing my name.

Probably the scariest thing I saw on my trip into town from the airport was the clouds.  Thunder rumbled from behind big, jagged, black clouds which sat just above the Johannesburg skyline, with an eery, silver light filling the gap between them and the horizon.  In this gap was the silhouette of a few of Johannesburg's tallest buildings (on the whole it is a fairly low city) and the Hillbrow tower (which I recognised only because Hillbrow has the dubitable honour of being Jo'burg's most dangerous suburb).  Arriving in the late afternoon meant the traffic was bad, which gave me time to take in the surroundings - people, cars, rubbish, more people - as we drove through the city to my hotel.

The next day, after a 12 hour sleep, I had arranged with Solomon to head into town for a few hours, lest I spend the whole day sitting in my hotel room too scared to leave.  I walked over Nelson Mandela Bridge, visited the Africa Museum and went to the top of the Carlton Tower - at fifty stories, the tallest building in Africa (apparently).  Braving the streets for the first time, I was struck first by how few white people there are on the streets of Jo'burg.  I have been told this is a hangover from the post-apartheid fear of the 'black peril', which saw the mass exodus of businesses from the CBD in the mid-late 1990s.  It is only in recent years that the city has begun to recover, as the result of massive rejuvenation efforts.  But, unsurprisingly perhaps, its reputation is taking some time to catch up.  In any case, noone paid much attention to me and I certainly I saw nothing on my first trip out to make me nervous, but there's nothing like the company of a local to give you courage, and I did keep my hands pretty close to my pockets nonetheless.

My tour ended with a trip to the Pick'n'pay, to get some supplies for my hotel cupboard - this time Solomon waited outside, while I ventured inside to do my shopping by myself.  My safety plan in any new place has always been to look like a local.  Keep a purposive expression, walk like you have somewhere to go, and at all times look like you know what you are doing.  So I put this plan into effect, strutting up and down the aisled filling my basket like a pro.  It was a textbook performance, right up until the end, when the woman ahead of me in the check-out queue politely pointed out that the bananas and nectarines in my pile should have been weighed and priced back in the produce section, and then insisted that she would mind my spot while I went back to remedy my mistake (I was perfectly happy to just leave them behind).  By the time I ran the length of the supermarket to the produce section, got lost trying to find the weighing counter, got in trouble for not having my bananas in a plastic bag, and returned to the expanding queue of impatient customers, my street cred was well and truly shattered.

So that was the morning of Day 1 in Johannesburg.  The afternoon was quite different, spent doing my very favourite thing in the world - sitting in a cafe.  But I think that deserves its own blog entry...

Nelson Mandela Bridge - built to join the suburbs of Braamfontein
and Newtown and opened in 2003 by Nelson Mandela himself 

The Africa Museum - sadly I think the building itself was the highlight

Street art in the city - there are apparently some 1500 or so of these head carvings around Newtown
and the CBD, part of the government's plan to make Johannesburg the world's largest art gallery

Me on the Top of Africa

The offending bananas