The best laid plans don't always avoid Hillbrow

I've been back from Panama for a week now and have been reviewing my weekend get-away schedule with Jo and there actually aren't that many free weekends left when it all boils down to it. So you could say we've been making up for lost time with a string of weeknight catch-ups and weekend excursions to various parts of Johannesburg to give ourselves the necessary experience to look a South African in the eye and say "Yes, I have been to (insert place) and it was (insert superlative)".

Saturday was a day of recovery from a hectic work week and our first experience hosting a 'braai' (BBQ if you're from most anywhere else in the world) on Friday night. The afternoon was spent at Zoo Lake watching actual africans enjoy themselves in the park with a mixture of smokey braais, soccer and in some cases a little singing and dancing. I say actual africans because this is in stark contrast to the uber-afrikaaner region of Sandton where we are based. To live here is to almost be given a License of Eternal Forgiveness for Being Oblivious to Living on the African Continent. I suspect that there are only more whites in the Free State, although English is probably more widely understood here in Sandton.

Anyhow, the Zoo Lake trip (during daylight) was closely followed by a trip to Johannesburg's Chinatown. It turned out to be a relatively confined strip of Chinese grocers and restaurants. It can safely be said that the highlight of this trip was not the food but the selection of driving route. We had a choice between a convoluted northerly route and a pretty straight-forward southerly route on what appeared to be fairly major roads. The path of least resistance is usually the easiest to take however this is not a town in which one arbitrarily selects routes from A to B. We had inadvertently selected a route that scraped uncomfortably close the most unsavoury suburb in what is by many accounts one of the most dangerous (not-currently-involved-in-war) cities in the world. All it took was a very innocent wrong left hand turn just on the cusp of Hillbrow that landed us in a particularly dodgy area. And there was no way out - it was a busy street, no where to turn off and no way to overtake in the bumper-to-bumper traffic gridlocked along the occasionally one way street. Clearly not an area for whites, we were particularly focussed on one gentleman crossing back and forth in front and behind our car wielding a golf club. We came through unscathed but not without some enhanced memories of the general road layout of Jo'burg.

This reminded me of the security briefing the Red Cross security unit had given us in Geneva before coming down here. The friendly ex-military chap that gave us the drill (no pun intended) on the region warned us of something he called Nairobi Syndrome, a situation in which newbies to a dangereous area are initially particularly precautious and as a result generally avoid trouble. After 3 months of no trouble the slighly more experienced newbie feels increasingly more comfortable with the situation and pushes some boundaries but their overridingly cautious behaviour still keeps them out of trouble. At 6 months, however, a relatively lengthy problem-free streak results in a degree of complacency together with an overriding sense of imperviousness with the inevitable consequence of eventually ending up on the wrong end of a firearm. It was the aforementioned incident that brought this sage advice crashing back into my conciousness.

This is apparently the exact opposite of what the local community newspaper wants people to have top of mind. The front page of our local rag ran with the following front page this week:

It's not until you get to page two that the practically un-newsworthy issues of rape, murder, armed robbery and other insignificant happennings of our well-to-do neighbourhood are dealt with (note this is a weekly paper):

Anyway Mum, everything's just fine here. See you in a few months.

The tourist trap

It's an interesting thing, people's holiday preferences. Some people enjoy roughing it on local transport and mixing it with the locals at the market and on the street. Others prefer sticking to the big cities, staying in comfortable hotels with limo transfers from the airport where the closest they get to a local is hopefully no nearer than the already terrifyingly thin 1/4" of tinted and reinforced glass separating them in their air-conditioned cacoon from, well, whatever the hell it is on the other side. Others still, apparently, desire a combination of the raw sense of adventure you can only get in a place like Africa whilst retaining some semblance of comfort and safety that can only be provided by comfortable lodgings in a rustic, semi-remote setting not far off a major highway, and some animatronic predatory animals. This is a niche ably filled by Sun City.

OK, this may be taking the description of Sun City too far. I didn't really want to talk about Sun City anyway, but instead the nearby Pilanesberg National Park. But the offerings of Sun City are really such a distraction that I feel compelled to draw your attention to them. I mean what is a game safari when it doesn't carry with it the risk of contracting malaria? This is truly Disneyland come to Africa, and quite possibly the greatest affront to tourism that I've so far seen on this continent.

Perhaps my experience at Pilanesberg was tainted not so much by Sun City but by a week of slow recovery from drug resistant Zambian food poisoining, or the fact that I didn't see anything but stock animals such as impala and wildebeest on the cold, windy and interminably dull game drive. I happened to see an episode of Long Way Down (Ewan McGregor's self-indulgent motorcycle road trip adventure 'documentary') just after we arrived back from Pilanesberg. In one scene his team are charging about the bush in a 4WD looking for big cats. Their guide spots one from afar and after a considerable chase they finally identify their quarry, a very confused looking domestic cat in long grass. McGregor's team were blessed with a sense of humour and managed a hearty laugh at this particular misadventure, but at the conclusion of our safari I just felt empty and longed for the consolation that could have been provided by a tacky animatronic beest at the park exit gate.