When I came to South Africa in 2013, the first stop on my Round the World trip, I didn’t get any closer to Johannesburg than the airport, taking an immediate connecting flight to Cape Town. This time, I decided to venture into the large city. Only for a period slightly longer than 24 hours, mind you. I wanted closer to 48, but the mileage flights United was offering during the Christmas season did not cooperate. Instead, I got 24 hours to pack as much as I could into a very odd city.
Johannesburg is many things. The financial and industrial
hub of South Africa, one of the rising global cities as it moves further away
from its, and its country’s, dark past. The city is also known for being
dangerous, exceedingly so to the point where most lit streets are not walkable
past 7 or 8 unless you are in a large group. It is also a massive, massive
city. Google Maps does a bad job of showing the sheer size of the city. What
looks like a relatively simple car ride is actually a 10km journey onto
freeways. I learned all these things during my 24 hours in Johannesburg. I will
likely go back, partly because I have to (there are major things I failed to
do) and because I want to. It is not Cape Town – few places are; but it holds
its own as a tourist destination.
In my drive to my Hotel, I tried to think of the best
comparison for Johannesburg. In some ways, it is a good mix of a European city,
with nice, clean, maintained highways and roads, and a distinctly first-world
feel at the macro level, and Mexico, with pockets of slightly dirty areas with
cobbled sidewalks and barred buildings. There is one immediate takeaway,
though, and that leads to the fact that the safety concerns are very much real.
Swaths of the outer city is residential neighborhood – nice residential
properties, well designed and manicured. But all of them, truly all of them,
have either barbed wire on top of walls enclosing the property, or have
electric fences.
That was an ominous sign, to say the least, that no matter
how out-of-America these streets looked, with trees in the middle shadowing the
well-paved roads below it, there is danger lurking. The closest comparison I
could think of was in the Jurassic Park
book, when the group reaches the hotel rooms for the first time, they are
totally luxurious, but the scientist notices that the windows are barred in
with thick steel. Something is lurking.
One of the issues with Johannesburg is that it is so big
that many of the nice sites are quite a bit outside of the city center. Things
like the Monte Casino Bird Park and Lion and Rhino Park, top sites by my
research, are just too far to dedicate a large portion of the 24 hours I had. I
stuck to mostly sites inside the city proper. My first was the only one I had
to do, the Apartheid Museum.
There’s no easy way to describe what I saw in the Apartheid
museum, but I will say they were largely fair to the entire era in South
African history – to all sides. The museum is sprawling, and doubles as a nice
history museum for South Africa as a whole. There is no stone unturned in what
they show you about South Africa’s history. Of course, it is largely horrible,
but it also goes into the various factions, the multiple eras of protests and
violence, the long struggle, the reasons Mandela was imprisoned, to why he was
released, and finally to the modern South Africa that is trying to escape this
past.
The museum itself takes about 90 minutes, closer to two hours
if you want to see everything. It is a bit overwhelming actually. One of my
favorite takeaways, actually, was learning how much of a presence Mahatma
Gandhi had in South Africa (more on that later). By the end of it, you get an
incredibly deep and lasting sense of what Apartheid, and the separation is all
about. And you are also thankful that South Africa is a bit different today.
Of course, then I went to my next area to try to get some
lunch and learned that maybe it isn’t so different, at least in terms of
perception. I decided to go to Mabenong, a new ‘artsy’ district of Johannesburg
that essentially is building up what used to be wasted land in the heart of the
city. That description of the district is accurate, though the district is far
more lively during their weekend markets, and during the day time. I reached
approximately at 4:00 PM, and one of the large hubs of artistry, the Arts @
Main, closes promptly at 4. I went to a restaurant in the Mabenong district
that lived up to that description.
The restaurant was called Baobeng, and it served various
dishes from around Africa, while also moonlighting as a bar. Given I arrived at
4:15, most people inside were going there for the bar aspect. Now, when I say
that maybe Apartheid hasn’t fully left us, I won’t be afraid to say I chose to
go to the place where I saw the most foreigners. I’m not proud of this, as I
usually laugh off these claims of ‘stay safe’, but I did this. In the end, I
still chose a nice place that was frequented by foreigners and locals alike and
the food, a lamb curry dish from Ghana, was quite good. Better was the cold Castle
beer, one that I had forgotten. That and Milk and Honey (still to come) was the
staple of my early trip.
After that I retired back to the hotel for a while, still a
bit tired off of my long journey to South Africa, enjoying some of the added
hospitality of being an IHG Platinum member using my free night – which made it
all the more ironic that I was upgraded to a Junior Suite, given that I was
staying for free. I went to the lounge for a bit, and then left for dinner. I
chose to go to one of the restaurants that was recommended for both its food
and service. It was called Browns of Rivonia. I’m not entirely sure what ‘Browns’
referred to, but Rivonia was the suburb it was in – a suburb known for being
where Mandela and Co. used to ‘conspire’ to overthrow to South African
Government in the 60’s. The place itself now is really nice, situated in a
residential property with a lush backyard of greens and creeks and a terrace
seating overlooking of all that.
The restaurant is noted for its wine list, to which I
actually had some. I know nothing about wines, but it tasted good. It was a
South African wine. For the meal, I decided to have Biltong as a starter.
Biltong is a famous beef part that is used way to often (and often way too
well) as a starter, and it was predictably good. The real treat, though, was my
main, which was a dish that was essentially three different preparations of
Ostrich. That big bird is already a personal favorite of mine, and the dish did
it justice. Placed side by side, it was first a small Ostrich steak on top of a
bed of sweet potato, then a Ostrich Spring Roll (the worst of the three, and a
solid B+), and then a dish that mixed cut-up pieces of Ostrich with liver and
onions. The meal was fantastic, the place even better. The only other people
there were three couples (all separate), dressed up to the nines. I myself
decided to dress up decently well given the place. All in all it was an
enjoyable night.
My second day in Cape Town also had a defined starting
point, as I had pre-booked tickets to the SAB World of Beer tour at 11:00. I
decided, after sleeping in longer than I should have, and eating breakfast at
the hotel. Working backwards, I knew I needed to leave to the airport at 6:00,
so that gave me 7 hours to play with. The World of Beer tour started promptly
at 11:00, and it was actually way more than I bargained for.
The tour itself is not of the brewery. SAB (now SAB Miller
after merging with Miller – though there is zero mention of Miler anywhere) is
anyway a multinational brewery. The tour was actually through the history of
beer, and then through the brewing process. The history part was interesting,
with various exhbits showing beer in the Egyptian era, the start of beer in
Sub-Saharan Africa (including a taste of the thick beer brewed in these remote
villages), and then through its expansion in Europe. Each part is designed like
that period so there are Egyptian columns, African huts, and then an abbey
hallway. It is very impressive given what I would have expected.
The tour through the beermaking process was about as
impressive. It started in an indoor garden to show the actual raw product of
malt barley and hops, and through each single step of the process. It really is
a great education into the beer-making process, including an area where you can
taste the raw barley. The tour finally ends at their in-house pub, where each
tour ticket comes with two free pints of beer on tap. I also opted to pay like
$2 extra to get a beer tasting, which was also informative. The beer tasting
includes various South Africa only choices (Castle) and sampling of various
other beers under the SAB umbrella (Peroni, Carling, Pilsener Urlequer, and no
Miller). My favorite was the Castle Milk Stout, which I don’t remember the last
time I was in South Africa.
The Beer tour actually took a lot longer than I had anticipated,
leaving me with less time than planned. I think walked around the city center
for a bit, all the while checking my six. It is actually a bit eerie how empty
the streets are during the day. They aren’t empty enough to make me feel
unsafe, but far less empty than streets in the center of any other main city. Still,
it was a nice walk to see how urbanized, in a good way, Johannesburg had
become. I think took an uber out to Bedfordview, another suburb that looked a
lot closer on the map than it actually was, to go to lunch at Turn ‘n’ Tender,
a locally famous chain of steakhouses. There I had the Biltong plate as an
appetizer, and their lunch special of lamb chops, both quite good if a bit unmemorable.
From there I went back to the hotel to check out, and then
do two last tourist stops during my too-short time in Johannesburg. Both were
close to my hotel – in this case actually reasonably close. I still had to take
an uber to the first one, but it was the shortest, cheapest uber ride yet. The
destination was the Satyagraha House, the place where Mahatma Gandhi used to
stay when he lived in South Africa, which he did for much of 1896-1920. The
house is now a guesthouse, but the have maintained the actual house structure
as a lasting museum, and it is set up in the way it was when Gandhi lived
there. The house is incredibly serene, totally quiet except for a few birds
chirping. In the house you almost feel a sense of peacefulness and zen. There
is a ladder that takes you to the loft where Gandhi used to sleep and all the
while you feel a sense of calm.
I spent about 30 minutes walking around the house – the only
thing they added are panels in each room that explained the deep relationship
between Gandhi, his South African host Kellerbosch, and how inextricably linked
he was with the early push against discrimination in South Africa. Sure, he was
largely against it from a perspective of what it did to the Indians living in
South Africa, but he was an equal champion for the cause of the Africans. It
was a great way to end my last tourist time in Johannesburg.
I returned to the hotel with enough time to have a coffee,
and take my uber to the airport. Quick note about Uber in South Africa. I never
really take Uber in the US. I took it in India because it is easier than being
denied by umpteen auto drivers in Bangalore, and it is as cheap as a conventional
cab in Mumbai. But I think the service works best in South Africa. This is a
country where at many times, especially if you are largely alone, you want door
to door service. Uber offers you this luxury. It is not cheap, but then from
what I remember of my time in Cape Town, neither are the taxis. Uber is perfect
for this environment, and I imagine I will take many an Uber in Cape Town as
well.
My uber driver dropped me off to Johannesburg OR Tambo airport at 6:40, but that ended up being more than enough time to spare. I was a bit sad to be ending my time in Johannesburg. I didn’t have nearly enough time as I needed. I wanted an extra day, but I couldn’t get anything that would take me from Mumbai to Johannesburg other than the Turkish Airlines route that spent 10 hours in Istanbul. Those are 10 hours I would have much rather have had in Johannesburg. I didn’t get to do Soweto, or even venture a bit outside to some of the wildlife destinations that are there. Of course, those will be teed up for next time.
