After driving through the freezing cold wind of the Kalahari - as one expects when driving through the midday sun of a desert - we arrived in South Africa. Almost magically, everything was, well green. It's almost as if they decided the border based on where their lawn finally died.
Driving on to Jo-burg was like driving through the small-towns in the Southern US, except on the wrong side of the road. Of course, the analogy stops once we actually got into the towns, because they seemed to be just full of people hanging around listlessly looking at us. Aparthied may be removed from the political landscape, but the effects and economic divisions - which usually run along racial lines - are still very visibly there.
On second thought, I guess it's much like most small towns in the southern US.
There was a sense of foreboding coming into Jo-burg. Everyone had heard the stories about the rampant crime in the place, so everyone was on the lookout. Every street corner was a potential car-jacking waiting to happen. Even if you didn't have a car, they will supply one for you - that's how efficient they are!
Even the locals we spoke to gave us advice on how not to look like a tourist and, therefore a target. One person at the ATM said "There's an edge to living in Jo'burg...if something bad is going to happen to you, well then it's going to happen". The only people who painted a pretty picture were those working in the tourist industry; and even then the best they could do was "All big cities have crime".
It didn't help things to see every building bigger than a Rubik's Cube to be walled in and topped with electric wires which I imagine are a bit more harmful to people than they are to the elephants which may encounter such fences in a game park. If the farmer in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" was right in saying "Good fences make good neighbours", then these must be the best damn neighbours since the Mongols and the Chinese!
(I would just like to digress at this point and mention how pompously self-satisfied I am with the literarily insightful and historically sardonic analogy above :-))
Also if there wasn't a sign that said "Armed Response" posted on the wall, there was an armed guard already there. Even the guy who collects the 30 cents to use the toilet at the petrol station had a shotgun. Now he didn't have a uniform or anything, so he may just have been some guy who happened to be there - and happened to be armed to the teeth - but you know what? For 30 cents, I wasn't going to potentially piss him off by asking!
But in all fairness, after all the fear and paranoia about being in Jo-burg...nothing happened. And nobody saw anything happen. Everyone had a good time, which would have been even better if everyone had loosened up a little.
A visit to Jo-Burg would not be complete (I must apologize for plagiarizing every single tourist pamphlet on the planet with this opening) without visiting Soweto township and the Aparthied museum; not at all what I expected. The township is massive and also includes the largest hospital complex in the Southern Hemisphere (which is mostly staffed by Cuban doctors. This, I think is the affect of Globalisation on the brain-drain. As SA doctors flee to Canada and the UK, they grab them from Cuba. Now where Cuba is expected to get doctors from? I don't know. But any conspiracy theorist worth his salt will be pointing a finger at the US and the Monroe Doctrine for Cuba’s woes.
Unlike the vast favelas of places like Rio, here the housing ranges from at the very lowest shoe boxes, to rather impressive mansions at the other end of the spectrum. The majority of people live in tiny houses somewhere in between. Better neighbourhoods are divided from poorer ones simply by a road. There are nine entrances to Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnship, in case you're wondering) and during the time of Apartheid, there was no mention of it on any road signs or maps. It practically wasn't there...except for the fact that millions lived there.
Although everyone on the tour was impressed by the level of cleanliness, order and pride within Soweto, there was still a disturbing aspect to it, and to the numerous other townships (which seemed to be much more dilapidated than Soweto) we passed along the way. This was because all the townships - instead of having normal street lighting which would give them a warmer, community aspect - were interspersed with huge floodlight towers which I'm sure were more to the benefit of police raids than the community below. They made the townships seem like huge prison yards rather than communities...and maybe that was the point.
