Wednesday, September 21, 2022

a city tour, heading home, and some final thoughts

Today was, sadly, our last day in South Africa before flying home to our various countries. We spent the morning on a tour of Johannesburg with our guide Kennedy as he took us to a few different neighborhoods and sites. (Poor Jason unfortunately had to spend the morning at the US embassy since his passport has been stolen at Graskop, but thankfully he was able to get a temporary passport to get home!)

We started in the affluent residential neighborhood of Houghton, where Nelson Mandela lived after he was released from prison after 27 years. Our first stop was his primary family residence (which has since been turned into a hotel), followed by the home he lived in with his wife Graça Machel until he died in 2013.

Staying in the Houghton neighborhood, we drove over to the Munro Drive Viewpoint, which has some beautiful views of the city and overlooks The Wilds, an inner city park and nature reserve.

Our next stop was “The View,” the oldest surviving structure in Parktown, and one of the oldest houses in Johannesburg and the best surviving example of the neo Queen Anne style. Today it’s the meeting place of the Transvaal Scottish regiment of the South African Army, and is also an events space…

…ok, this is where I fully admit that my paying-attention skills were totally lacking, as I remember taking in the pretty building but cannot remember a thing about the reason we stopped at this site – the above details are me Googling after the fact. I’m sure there was a significant reason we stopped, but I honestly cannot remember. My bad!

Moving on, our next stop was the business district and local government seat of Braamfontein, home to a lot of street art and clearly some urban renewal initiatives following Apartheid. We got the sense that it’s now become an artsy hipster neighborhood with trendy little bars and coffee shops and creative types.

That “The Purple Shall Govern” art depicting Nelson Mandela was created by Shepard Fairey (the same artist who designed the Obama “HOPE” art), and powerfully refers to the “Purple Rain” anti-apartheid protest in 1989 when a police water cannon with purple dye was sprayed on thousands of protestors who came into the city to march.

Right by that mural is the very hidden JFF Rooftop Farm, a little coffee shop and plant nursery that you get to by climbing a ladder. We took a short coffee break and enjoyed this great example of bringing some green space into an otherwise urban neighborhood of high-rises. (This whole neighborhood had a very Brooklyn vibe.)

It’s a good thing I had customs on my mind because as a plant-buying addict I would’ve 100% been in trouble here haha. Proud of myself for holding off.

So apparently the city of Johannesburg was founded as a result of a massive gold rush in the late 1800s, growing from nothing to a legit city practically overnight as people found out there was gold to be found here.

You can’t visit the operational gold mines as a tourist, but it turns out there’s a little free Mineshaft Museum hidden inside the headquarters of Standard Bank downtown. When they were building the (very impressive) bank, they discovered an access tunnel to an old mine, which turned out to be the Ferreira Mine, one of the first that was built during the gold rush. They decided to preserve a part of it and keep it as a dedication to Joburg’s mining heritage.

Turns out that hidden on one side of the stadium was a fantastic gallery called the Living Artists Emporium, home to room after room (!) of art from 30+ current South African artists. It’s such a cool space, and it’s great that they help provide this resource and platform to support local artists.

We walked through pretty quickly and I wish I had more time, though I’m glad that their website offers a pretty complete virtual gallery of all of the art to really take the time to digest. So much of it was really exceptional!

We started out in the Art of the Continent store, offering a bunch of great little African crafts. I think most of us did some solid souvenir shopping here.

As one final group get-together, we found ourselves at the Bond Society bar, toasting to our amazing trip, and all in denial that after this we’d have to grab our suitcases and head to the airport.

Some final thoughts

• Overall I thought the itinerary was a perfect blend of action-packed and down time. Definitely got my adrenaline on and saw lots of cool things, but also had plenty of time to have a mental reset from work, enjoy my time off, and do the all-important vacation soul-audit.

• I always try to get a sense of the local music (old and new) when I travel, and South Africa is an embarrassment of riches. Before the trip I already knew Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo just because they’re all relatively well-known, but I discovered some new ones while I was there and particularly enjoyed listening to them while sitting in the peaceful hanging chair on the porch of my tent at the Mdluli Lodge. Here are a few newfound highlights – honestly so many more to include here but trying to keep it reasonable haha. I also made a little sampler Spotify playlist if you’re interested.

  • Vusi Mahlasela… whom I discovered I actually already had a few songs from in my music library, as part of the soundtrack to the great documentary Amandla! about the role of music and singing in fighting Apartheid. I love that movie, and he’s featured heavily in it, but for whatever reason I didn’t put two and two together at first. I’m surprised he’s not more well-known (outside of South Africa), to be honest.

  • Lucky Dube - Really influential reggae artist who brought African reggae mainstream and helped bridge cultural gaps by bringing Jamaican roots… back to its roots. There’s so much meaning to his music beyond the music itself, but this is definitely in my rotation now on those days when you just want to sit and chill in the park and take in the world.

  • Broadly, Amapiano, which is like a combo of jazz, house, and lounge music that originated in South Africa about 10 years ago. This song 3Alli just dropped in early August ‘22 – This is Juluka* joined by a trio of South African singer Kamo Mphela, Nigerian singer Reekado Banks, and Moroccan singer Salma Rachid – and keeps getting stuck in my head. Killer rhythm. (*A little confused by this, since Juluka was a Zulu band in the 60s & 70s that apparently disbanded in 1985, so… is this a tribute? Not sure.)

  • Bernice West - A young Afrikaans singer who is brand new to the scene but clearly is becoming a Thing. Can I understand the words? No. Do I care at all when someone’s clearly a great singer? No.

  • Letta Mbulu - A jazz singer since the 1960s who’s still recording in her 80s. She emigrated to the US because of Apartheid, but is clearly a South African icon, and total badass.

• We ended up seeing 3.1 of the “Big 5” (I’m giving those farm rhinos a .1) but my takeaway is that that classification –which pops up everywhere– is overrated. There were so many other cool animals we saw that arbitrarily didn’t make that list! The lion, though, I get it. Rightfully top of the checklist.

• The Brits of the group dubbed me an honorary Brit a couple of nights before the end of the trip. No idea what their criteria is, but as a maybe-not-closeted Anglophile I’m happily running with it haha. And hope to get to the UK to visit!

• Seriously, ask for Astrid at the Cape Town One&Only Spa. You’re welcome.

• For those who care about photography: I have been a dedicated Canon camera & lens person since college (I shot the first few days of this trip with an R6, for what it’s worth), and so was nervous about crash-coursing my way around Rachel’s Sonys in Kruger. Definitely a little learning curve on the spot, but it turns out that Maya Angelou was right and we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. The More You Know 💫

• Load shedding really sucks. To be frank, it seems like there’s more than a little corruption going on in the South African government (not that I can talk as an American right now), but for it to bleed into the energy infrastructure that inevitably affects millions of everyday South Africans is just not cool. “TIA,” I guess, as Jamie would say. (This is Africa, with a shrug.) But still. Get it together, Eskom. Making people live without electricity in an otherwise modern country is very uncool.

• The plants all over this country are fascinating and otherworldly! Apparently there are more different species of plants on Table Mountain alone than in all of the UK.

• I still can’t believe how lucky we were to have the weather we had for pretty much the entire trip. Really just perfect temperatures every single day, and the most ridiculous bright blue skies. Even the 90-something days in Kruger were pretty comfortable since there’s really no humidity and we were driving fast in open-side vehicles all day. I feel like Flash Pack must’ve paid someone off since they were using this trip for Rachel to capture marketing content haha.

• Speaking of luck, I also can’t believe how lucky we were to have the group we had. Surely in a random selection of 15 people there’s bound to be an unbearable asshole or a total weirdo, but that wasn’t the case at all. Even though we all came from very different places and had a wide spectrum of personality types, we genuinely all got along. No exceptions. Incredible.

Tot ons weer ontmoet, South Africa! ❤️