South Africa's Capital

We were in johannesburg for 1 day and 2 nights before the safari with Nadia and hussein and came back after the safari. Adam and I were not the biggest fans of joburg. A lot of people opt to skip it altogether because of its reputation of being a very dangerous city. Google maps always gives you the weirdest directions to get from point a to b and sometimes makes you go through sketchy areas which put both of us on edge. We are a lot more cautious after we were jumped in Peru a few years ago and sometimes probably overly paranoid.

There are extremes in this city and all through out south Africa. The rich are very rich - you will even find Aston Martin and other high end car dealerships here that we don't even have many of in north America. The only areas of the city I left comfortable in were Melrose arch, sandton and rosebank. I quite liked our hotel in Melrose arch called Protea fire and ice - very trendy and good nightlife right in our hotel which was great because there was no way we felt safe driving around after sunset in joburg. We were stopped once by a traffic cop for a routine drivers license check but thank god he wasn't asking for a bribe or making our lives difficult. We met up with Alia and hussein twice in joburg which was nice as well. The part we don't like is that these areas are almost like gated communities and do not really represent the rest the city.

We went to the gold reef city theme park and had a tour of an old gold mine which was interesting and then went on a few rides. It was somethig to do but not sure if it worth what we paid to do it. Today Adam and I went to the Sunday market on the rooftop of the zone mall in rosebank, which was good for souvenir shopping and cheap eats followed by a visit to the Apartheid museum which was very educational - we read about the life of nelson Mandela and the whole apartheid history in south Africa. Unfortunately you weren't allowed to take pictures in the museum. The stories are very sad but you realize how and why Nelson Mandela is considered a Demi god to most south Africans and why he is a Nobel prize winner. There are streets, hotels and restaurants named after him and his pictures and statues can't be missed. During the apartheid, even the Asians, which would have included us if we will there, were discriminated against. It was an official white vs non-white policy. Although the apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s, there is still a huge economic disparity between the black and white population, which I found was most apparent in Cape town. Hopefully the next time we go back to south Africa, probably in a few decades, it will have changed even more.