Sophie's Trip

For months people have been telling me how dangerous Johannesburg is. As I'm getting a bus into Park Station, a place supposedly notorious for criminal activity, I was worried that I was about to find out for myself! Unsure of where to go to wait for an Uber without getting instantly robbed, I asked a stern looking security guard. She told me where to go, and then said to wait 5 minutes as she was finishing her shift and also had to hail an Uber. She walked me out to the road, waited with me by the security hut, and waited with me until my Uber arrived before getting into hers. Honestly god bless South African women, they have saved my skin on more than one occasion while I've been travelling around South Africa on the, at times, sketchy public transport system.
I made it to my hostel in Jeppestown in the centre, which is a part of Maboneng, or "place of light" in Sesotho, one of the local languages. Maboneng started when artist Johnathan Liebmann bought a block of warehouses in the deprived Jeppestown and brought in prominent artists to transform them into galleries and studios. Slowly the area was gentrified (often a dirty word but in this case I think it was needed) with the opening of cafes, restaurants, bars, club's, and hotels, and more recently apartments, supermarkets, and international chains - making the turn around of the area more sustainable. This makes the area really vibrant and a fun place to spend a few days. But for me - only a few days was enough as one of the club's played music so loud that the windows of my hostel rattled until 3am! I don't think you're supposed to sleep in Maboneng, just do as the locals do and party all night.
While there I did a walking tour of the inner city, which was a great way to see the area safely. I saw some amazing street art, visited a traditional medicine market, learnt about the history of the city, went to Gandhi's office, and walked through some pretty sketchy areas (where I'm pretty sure I saw Eco, the guide, slipping money to guys on the street when greeting them - protection money maybe? Or have I just watched too many gangster films?).
The next day I went with him to Soweto, or the South West Townships where black people were forcibly moved to in the 1903 after an outbreak of the plague, and again in the 1930s by the apartheid government. There we went to Kliptown the earliest settlement in Soweto, Vilakazi street where both Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu lived and the site of the start of the student uprisings, the Soweto Gold Brewery, and had braai at the Soweto towers, an old power station where you can bungee jump from between the towers if you want to (I didn't, but I did go to the top for the view!) Finally I went on yet another bus tour to see some more of the city, and visited Constitutional Hill, the site of a prison that housed many political prisoners including Gandhi and Madela.
Many travellers skip Johannesburg because of the safety concerns, and I nearly did too but I'm glad I gave it a go as it's a really interesting city and I had a lot of fun. You just have to be super careful!Leia mais