Saturday, 24-Feb-2007: The flight from Perth is another 'Code Share'. I booked with Quantas and get to use the Quantas lounge, but the actual flight is operated by South African Airways, using an Airbus A340.
So here I am, over the Indian Ocean, in a South African Airlines Airbus A340-200, headed for Johannesburg. The flight took off right time, 12:50 and they served a very good meal. Now they've turned off the lights to encourage us to sleep. Sleep? It's only 2.00 pm in Perth and eight o'clock in the morning at our destination. Still, it's a good, electric recline seat (including lumbar support and, if you want it, a massage feature) and they supply a duvet, so I try to get some rest. At the halfway point in the flight, they serve little tubs of ice cream. It's amazing how we now accept the wonders of long-distance air travel - a journey of about 5,000 miles scheduled to take around ten and a half hours. Our current speed is 489 mph, altitude is 39,000 feet and the outside air temperature is minus 59 Celsius. And yet, all I feel is boredom ('are we there yet?') and minor irritation that not all the feature films seem to be working correctly on my console. But the food is excellent and the cabin staff friendly and attentive.
When we land, somewhat ahead of schedule I believe, we disembark via covered steps to the tarmac, where I manage to get in the first bus to the terminal. There's only a short queue at passport control which is quick and friendly and only a few minutes to wait for my bag to come out. Customs is equally brief so I'm soon in the Arrivals Hall, looking for someone displaying my name. Nobody! Well, I locate a driver from my hotel who's come for somebody else and says he'll take me if my ride doesn't turn up. After a couple of minutes, he points to a girl who's appeared and she's displaying my name. The girl apologises (unneccessarily): she didn't expect the flight to be early. We're soon bowling along the motorway system to the Michelangelo Hotel at Sandton (www.michelangelo.co.za).
Check-in is friendly and painless - the room is more than adequate. Of course, I would normally stay at a city centre location, preferably at a classic site. But the notorious lawlessness of Johannesburg means that almost all of the hotels and half the businesses moved out to the 'new town' of Sandton, where the Michelangelo is sited. I'm told a mixture of CCTV and high-profile policing has reduced crime in the city by 80% but I wonder if business will come back?
The hotel architecture is a mixture of modern and faux-Roman which I associate with casinos and certainly isn't my preference, but the facilities are good and the staff extremely helpful. It's only about 7:30 pm local time but it seems much later to me, so I have a long soak in the good-sized bath and go to bed.
Sunday, 25-Feb-2007:
I initially sleep soundly but, once awake, have difficulty sleeping again for noisy air conditioning. The a/c in my room has been off since I arrived (my usual technique) but I can hear the air conditioning elsewhere in the hotel and, through the window, the air conditioning in the building opposite. I get up early (I haven't completely accommodated to the time change from Perth) and start to make arrangements. My multiway electrical adaptor, which has worked in every country I've visited to date, doesn't work in South Africa. No problem - reception can loan one. They use what looks like the old British three-pin 15-Amp plugs. I buy some time on their computer and catch up on e-mails. They've got quite a nice customer lounge with a couple of computers. After that, I appear to be the first one in for breakfast at 6:30 am and I enjoy a leisurely continental breakfast.
Then I take a walk round the block. Lots of modern buildings and what I'm told is the second-largest shopping mall in the Southern hemisphere. Interesting, but not really my style. Not wanting to spend the whole morning in the hotel or the mall, I book a morning tour of Johannesburg (I'm already booked on an afternoon tour of Soweto). I'm picked up at 8:30 am by a guide called Victor with a people carrier. We have one other pick-up for the tour at a nearby hotel and the three of us set off for Johannesburg. After a drive around the city centre, we take the motorway to Soweto. This means that there's going to be some overlap between the morning and afternoon tours. For the afternoon tour, I have Desmond. The history of Soweto is so complex and the approach of the two guides so different that the two tours were complementary. Mind you,when I get back to my room, just after 5:00 pm, I'm exhausted.
So, what did I see? Johannesburg was created by the Gold Rush which followed the discovery of gold by two Australian prospectors at the end of the 19th century. The city has some decent buildings from the 1900s, interspersed with skyscrapers which give it an American feel. One row of elderly shops has been preserved with the sign 'Nie Blankes' as a reminder of the apartheid era. Ghandi Square is nearby - remember, he practised law in South Africa for some time.
Close to the city lie the spacious houses built for the original city entrepreneurs around 1900. Not far away is the present millionaires row where house costs average around one million pounds. Depessingly, they are surrounded by high walls, surveillance systems and round-the-clock security. I saw the house Nelson Mandela occupied when president and another, one of the four houses he currently owns with his third wife.
Distances around Johannesburg mean that the city is threaded with flyovers and motorways. We take the route to the sprawling Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnship), passing the preserved pit head gear to Shaft Number 5. All around are the strange-looking, yellow mine dumps. Gold Reef City is a theme park with two more examples of preserved headgear. On the outskirts of Soweto, there is a middle class area with detached houses which would not look out of place in the U.K. Next, there are more modest houses with some facilities. Then, there are great long barrack blocks - the Hostels dating from the 1950s with communal taps and no power. These areas are illuminated with very tall lighting stanards, called locally 'Apollo Lights' originally provided to improve police surveillance.
Although there was a Soweto power station, it did not supply power to Soweto. It's now derelict, awaiting development as the inevitable shopping mall. The two massive cooling towers are now painted - one depicting scenes from South Africa's history, the other advertising a bank.
Some areas of crude wooden shantys still remain - the Government is committed to eliminating them in the next seven years, in an attempt to make Soweto a decent, self-sufficient city. Light industry is being encouraged, apartments are being built for rent and the private sector are being involved in housing developments, like the gaily painted apartments we passed similar to ones I've seen in Canary Wharf.
We pass through a street market selling everything from live chickens to huge plastic bowls which are used in lieu of baths and go to Freedom Square, where the ambitious bill of rights was adopted. We see 'Winnie's House' purchased for Nelson Mandela by an unlikely group of supporters including Qaddaffi, Jane Fonda and Clint Eastwood prior to Mandela's release from Robben Island and passed to Winnie in the divorce. I tour the more modest home Mandela lived in prior to his incarceration, now owned by a museum trust.
We visit the innocent-looking crossroads where, in 1976, the thousands of marching student protesters were stopped by police and shots were fired with tragic results. I visit the large Catholic church which gave sanctuary to the protesters and still displays the bullet holes from the ensuing firefight. The signatures of Nelson Mandela, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Chris Rock are pointed out to me in the visitors book. Finally, the Hector Peterson memorial and museum, movingly telling the story of the troubled events of 1976. Hector, you may remember, was fatally wounded in the shooting and the attempts to get him to hospital were immortalised in a famous photograph.
A new football stadium is being built in Orlando district for the forthcoming World Cup and an existing stadium is being extended. We see the biggest hospital in Africa - Chris Hani. Baragwanath and the black university. We see budding entrepreneurs running car wash businesses in the street, the single public park for the four million residents of Soweto, the horse drawn carts, the huge drive-in cinema atop a spoil heap. So many images, so much to ponder on.
