Leaving the airport, the area looked like many European countrysides and communities but drier with slightly different building styles. We soon noticed walls with barbed wire around most of the houses and commercial establishments. . Our driver Vincent said that they basically have two seasons: winter and summer. September is the beginning of spring. In this part of the world, winters are dry; the rains come in the spring and summer After taking a motorway a short distance, we exited into a residential area with neighborhood stores. One of the first signs we saw was for a kosher B & B. We passed a large Jewish school and saw pictures on street poles of a rabbi advertising a radio program. We didn’t need our driver to tell us, “this is a Jewish area. The Jews like to be together.” In the vicinity of our hotel, I saw families of religious Jews and men in kippot. The drugstore even had products with Hebrew lettering.
We arrived at Melrose Arch, which is very much like Santana Row with tree lined streets, upscale stores, and fine restaurants with outdoor seating....Our room was not ready, but the clerk expedited the cleaning so we got into the room at 9:15 and crashed and slept until 1 pm, despite nearby construction noises. Outside our window was a major building site with huge cranes and constant pounding. On the other side of our bedroom wall (we were the end room) was a jackhammer (I kid you not). After about 4-5 hours (Dan’s reluctant to change rooms) we managed to move to a quieter room.
I spent the next day in bed with the worst jet lag I have ever experienced. I’ll spare you the details. The following day our tour officially began with an excursion to Pretoria and Soweto, a township created for blacks to isolate them. Traffic in Jo’burg is as bad as L.A. We had to get off the freeway and take side streets, which actually gave us a chance to see more of Jo’burg than planned. The center of the city is virtually abandoned, with many high rise buildings completely empty, definitely not a safe place to go.
On our detour, we passed lovely homes, but they are surrounded by high walls with barbed wire on top, and locked security gates, not my idea of how to live.
While Jo’burg has more trees, mostly imported, than any other major city, they countryside is flat and extremely dry with few trees. We passed enormous pilings that resulted from drilling for gold.
Pretoria is the administrative capital of SA, Capetown the legislative, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital. It originated as a Boer city, but after Apartheid ended, many middle class blacks moved in. We were a bit too early, but in the spring the many jacaranda trees lining the streets are in bloom. We visited the downtown square with British architecture and a small garden outside of the government buildings. Other than it’s historical significance, it wasn’t that interesting, and I could have skipped the whole experience. I would change the famous song, “We are marching to Pretoria,” to “Let’s march away from Pretoria.”
Soweto (South Western Township), in contrast, was fascinating. It is the most populous (1 million) black township in SA, created in 1903 when they wanted to clear a slum near Jo’burg and basically isolate the blacks.
Soweto exploded in violent riots on June 16, 1976, when schoolchildren took the struggle against apartheid into their own hands, protesting a new law that required all schools to use Afrikaans as the official language. The children were peacefully marching in the street to a stadium, but hundreds of them were killed that day. Soweto has an impressive monument outside of an apartheid museum dedicated to the “Children’s March”. A famous photo (think Kent state) shows the first child killed that day with his sister by his side. The day we visited, his sister was outside the monument talking to visitors.
People in Soweto feel that they have the most famous street in the world since only some 30 yards a part are the homes of two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Tutu’s daughter currently lives in his home, which looks quite nice. Mandela’s home has been made into a museum, which we toured. It was small but probably quite nice by Soweto standards.
The ride back to Jo’burg was long because of the continuing traffic.
That night we had our welcome dinner. There are 24 people, all American on our tour: 7 couples and 10 women traveling together, either widowed, divorced, or their husbands didn’t want to go to Africa. The age range is 59 to 83, with most of the people around 69-72, all very well traveled. I met two teachers from San Jose, one of whom taught special ed in my district--small world!
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