Travel bloggers Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg, who are on a mission to visit almost every country in Africa, arrive in South Africa ahead of the World Cup. To read more about their experiences visit Border Jumpers.
Many of you might already be headed to Johannesburg for the World Cup and to be part of this historic event in Africa. If you’re not, why not? The energy as the days wind down is palpable, bursting from every corner of the country, and the excitement contagious.
For those headed this way, here are some tips on how to get the most out of “Jozi” or “Jburg”…
- Spend an entire day at the Apartheid Museum – it’s brilliantly laid out using technology and multimedia. The visits take you on a powerful journey that will forever change the way you look at race relations and racism. It was one of the most powerful and emotional experiences of our lives.
- Take a biking or walking tour of Soweto – make sure you don’t just visit Apartheid landmarks (although you should definitely also do that). Ask your tour guide to take you through several villages and slum areas, like the urban gardening projects we visited.
- Ditch your hotel for a homely B&B – we splurged (£50/night double en suite – though it’ll be twice that much during the World Cup) on a quaint bed and breakfast on Sunberry street, in the heart of the bohemian town of Melville. Melville is full of alternative shops, other B&Bs, two used bookstores, loads of pubs and even a burrito barn. What we loved most about the B&B was the large kitchen for us to cook in. We did a week binge of zero restaurants, cooking two meals a day, plus we enjoyed the free wifi, free laundry and even some free taxi rides.
- Visit the SAB Beer Museum – I’m not sure what it says about a city when its number one tourist attraction is a beer museum. I’m also not sure what it says about us that we contributed to such a statistic (and had a blast!). The tour is advertised everywhere in Johannesburg – it’s a one-and-a-half-hour guided tour organised by SAB brewing (partners with Miller-Coors in the USA), complete with a 3D adventure, an IMAX-style movie, real life machinery depicting the beer making process, and lots more. Oh, and did we mention the tasting?
When you arrive in Johannesburg, it’s hard not to notice how big this mega-city is – more than ten million people and one of the 40 largest cities in the world. While it is the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between the rich and poor is unlike anything we have seen (maybe with the exception of Kenya).We visited the slums of Germiston and Soweto, comparing the poverty to the decadence of the suburb Sandton and the East Gate Mall, the biggest mall in J’burg. How ironic that a city with so much wealth also has such extreme poverty, comparable or even worse to what we saw traveling in Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. Ironically a lot of housing projects for the poor were delayed and promises by politicians unkept in order to pursue decadent spending on building new soccer stadiums.
As part of our travel research, we also wanted to share with you an interesting site visit on how groups are responding in creative ways to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which South African society continues to suffer from.
We did a field visit to Johnson Matthey Catalysts in Germiston, South Africa, just outside of Johannesburg. There, nearly 600 workers pass through its doors every day to work on an assembly line making catalytic converters that are inserted in cars to reduce pollution, complying with South Africa’s auto environmental emissions standards. As we arrived, Percy Nhlapo, a trainer with the Solidarity Centre, an AFL-CIO affiliated non-profit organisation, was leading a discussion with a group of workers to correct misconceptions about the HIV virus and urging participants to get tested.
“HIV/AIDS affects everyone, educating workers is the first step in helping them prevent further infection. Getting tested is the second,” said Percy. After the training, nearly all the workers voluntarily agreed to be tested.
At the testing area, we spoke with registered nurse Dorothy Majola. “I find this job so rewarding because it so important that people know their status, as soon as they know their status they can change their lifestyle and behaviour, which it will allow them to live longer lives,” said Majola. The company, in coordination with NUMSA (the workers’ union) and the Solidarity Centre, agreed to host the training, allowing workers to attend and get tested at the beginning and end of their work shifts. Through programmes like these thousands of workers are voluntarily getting tested a year across the country.
Stay tuned for more tips for those visiting South Africa including posts on Durban and Cape Town!
This guest post was contributed by Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg of Border Jumpers. The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Cheapflights Ltd
