Jo'Burg
Funnily enough Johannesburg is like most major cities big, noisy and dirty but the underbelly is just that bit more sinister than most we’ve been used to, excluding Nairobi, which is a totally different planet for concern over personal safety (remind us to tell you the story of the news reporter and the television article on how to make your boot comfortable for car jacking). We drove through Hillbrow the most notorious inner city area and there was a real sense of danger, once proud hotels stood empty and derelict, litter clogged the streets and graffiti adorned every wall. This area, once the Soho of Jo’burg is perhaps best summed up by the story of the Holiday Inn, a hotel chain we all know, and have probably stayed in at one time or another, closed because the guests were being mugged inside the building. Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of this place to show you as we were too busy trying to lie low in the back of the vehicle and producing a camera at that point would have been tantamount to suicide.
The great thing about this type of one on one tour is that you get to hear so many things that you would never normally as a tourist and sometimes those things are tinged with such a dramatic and saddening realism. This blog isn’t the place to record some of the more stark information we gleaned from our experience but maybe one day, if you’re interested, we can have a chat about it.
