Traveling to South Africa: What an American Can Expect in the Gauteng Province

I had always wanted to visit Africa, so when my best friend joined the Peace Corps I immediately began thinking of when I would visit her. Once she was done with her training and settled into her second site I was able to make plans. I looked everywhere online and found the cheapest flights I could from New York, to Madrid, to Johannesburg for a little over $1000. An amazing price everyone tells me. The longest trip of my life, so bring plenty of reading material and expect to be tired.

I arrived two days later in Johannesburg, or Joburg, as everyone there calls it. The airport is really small, so I found everything very easily. I stayed with my friend and a family she had met for a couple days in Joburg as I got used to the time change. They were shocked I did not have locks on my suitcases, but my luggage was fine. My friend said it's just white paranoia, but they, the Afrikaans family I stayed with, insisted luggage always gets stolen there.

My friend kept insisting that everything was just like America, but on my drive from the airport to the house I realized it is not. The landscape looks nothing like the Northeast, maybe a little more like the Midwest, but the poverty there is like nothing in the US. The shacks we drove by in the townships were unreal. People kept telling me I was going to a civilized country, which I did, but just because everyone has access to electricity does not mean everyone has money. The townships are pieces of land that were set aside during apartheid for the blacks to live on for free. Today the land is still free, so many people just find what they can and build makeshift homes out of wood, tin, and whatever they can find. That was a real eye-opener for me.

The stucco house I stayed in made me feel like I was in Florida. I reminded my friend though, that in America we do not need to have gates around our houses. Every large house in South Africa has some sort of gate or fence around it because crime in the country is so high. You can go through entire neighborhoods and never know what a house looks like beca. I was also very surprised when one family we visited appeared to live in a bad area, but when we got inside the house was huge, and I realized the ugliness outside was just a cover. They live in a constant state of fear of things that we never think about in America. Every family I stayed with left their doors open, so the need for a fence was perhaps stronger. No one had air conditioning, but it wasn't needed at all. The houses stayed cool when the sun went down at night and the windows stayed open with no screens. An occasional moth bugged us, but nothing major. They do have some huge bugs, but I only noticed them at the game park.

The first real African thing my friend did was take me in a Kombi, or taxi, to visit an Afrikaner (white person who speaks the Dutch-based language of Afrikaans) that she had met during her training. Her friend was not too happy we took the taxi because only black people ride in them, but it was our only mode of transportation. We got a ride in a car to Rustenburg because the Joburg taxi rank/station is not safe at all. The taxis in Joburg have wars and the murder rate is very high. The Rustenburg taxi rank was an experience. It smelled like piss and fuel, but my friend knew what she was doing and we found the taxi we needed, ignoring all the stuff being shouted at us. The people were very helpful and excited that white people were using their transportation. When they found out we were American they treated us even better and were so excited to have us.

The blacks in South Africa like Americans because we helped apartheid, for that same reason the white Afrikaners do not like Americans. This has led to some interesting conflicts my friend has had in South Africa. But her South African friend welcomed us gladly into her beautifully decorated house. My favorite part of the house was the lapa which was like an open sunroom with a thatched roof. The only odd thing about the houses, aside from them leaving the doors and windows open is that the bathtub is in a different room from the toilet, as it is in England. After speaking with people you will find that everyone bathes and does not take showers.

If you can rent a car, rent one, but remember they drive on the other side of the road. It will feel normal very quickly. As for a taxi, I would not recommend it for families at all, if you're young and single, don't mind be harassed a little and want an adventure, then go ahead, it's the cheapest way to travel. Just don't go to the Joburg taxi rank.

We took another taxi another day to Gabaronne, the capitol of Botswana, a longer trip than we expected, but interesting and hot, to say the least. There wasn't much to do, but Botswana is apparently the safest country in Africa, so that was comforting and we met some really nice Botswanans who were extremely helpful and showed us around.

My first weekend we went to Pilanesburg National Park, a game reserve near the famous Sun City resort. This game park is not as large as the well-known tourist destination Krueger, in the Mpumalanga Province, but according the to Afrikaners I met it's better. The mother of the family I stayed with likes it because you don't have to drive as long to see animals. We were not even fifteen minutes into the game park and we saw rhinoceros. After that we drove around an hour before we saw more animals. Every so often we'd see zebra or wildebeest, especially near water. There was a very large watering hole with a viewing area that looked like something out of the Lion King. The landscape and animals in Africa are so incredibly hard to describe in words. The novel, once banned in South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country, does perhaps the best job describing the hills and grass. We saw giraffe, hippos, impala, springbok, warthogs, an elephant, and even a jackal. At one point we stopped where a group of cars had clustered to try and see the leopard everyone was talking about. We couldn't see it though. All these animals were found amongst the gorgeous, grass, odd colored rocks, and short little bushes.

The next day was the day I felt like I was in America. That was the day we went to Sun City. It is this huge resort in the middle of trees, mountains, townships, and basically nothing. In Africa when they say the middle of no where they mean it. To drive from town to town you drive an hour or two through the bush, trees, desert, or mountains before you see civilization. Sun City had a monorail from the parking lot to the resort area, similar to the one at Disney World. They had a nice water park with a couple good water slides and a wave pool. It was fun, relaxing, and so nice for this New Yorker to be swimming in January! The amazing thing is that in American dollars everything is very cheap! The admission to the Valley of the Waves (the water park area) even included a meal and ice-cream.

No where in America is food as cheap as it was in South Africa. The food menus seemed pretty much the same as they are in America at first. Then I began to realize, they didn't offer syrup with pancakes or french toast, which makes sense I suppose, because Africa is not exactly known for its maple trees. What was worse for me was as a person who does not like potatoes I became very frustrated with the menus. Everything came with fries or some form of potato. Meat and potato. Vegetables, or "veg", as I heard them call them, were not offered until I went to Cape Town which is a more touristy area. I have now told my family I will never eat another potato in my life. Overall the food was normal, I did try ostrich one day, which tasted like steak, and they made me try a Springbok, a minty shot they take when watching their rugby team, the Springboks, play. When I ordered water I had to pronounce the "t" sound otherwise they never understood what I was asking for.

Good luck understanding the Afrikaners speak English! The British South Africans will sound British, almost, and the blacks just sound African. The Afrikaner accent sounds like nothing I had ever heard. They roll their "r"s and have lots of funny names for things. Traffic lights are robots. Pickup trucks are bakkies. A barbecue is a braai. And my favorite that made me laugh the most was a flattened chicken we were getting ready to braai was called a flatty. I asked "what?" many times, yet so did they with my accent because apparently though they all knew we were American because of TV, we were told we did not sound like the Americans on TV. Yeah...I don't know either.

Since our hosts had to work we spent my second week exploring Pretoria, the capitol city, a little bit. We stayed at a beautiful hostel and walked everywhere we needed to go. One thing I noticed was that you will never see as many people walking on the side of the road as you will in Africa. I am in New York City every day and people walk everywhere there, so I take that back to some extent, but in the suburbs you do not see people walking. In America everyone has a car for the most part. In Africa they don't and hitchhiking is not illegal. You will see people waiting with their bags and baby slung on their back waiting for a car or taxi to pick them up. You will see groups of women walking with umbrellas, even when it's not raining, to protect them from the sun. You will see cattle, goats, ducks, monkeys, wandering on the side of the road. Many things that I kept saying to my friend were not "just like America" as she kept insisting.

I can't say much about Pretoria except that I was told not to bring a purse or I would get mugged, to make sure someone was keeping guard while I was at the ATM, and that Hatfield has a cute little town center. There were a lot of university students in that area, and a nice mall we went to. Pretoria reminded me of a suburban town in America aside from the fact that everything was fenced in and hoards of people walked on the streets. We ate at Harrie's Pancakes, which had delicious food and I was told was a place we had to go to. We had a fun walk back where the daily afternoon thunderstorm began.

While we were in Pretoria we decided to do a tour of Joburg and Soweto. Though we had been staying in Joburg we were on the outskirts, near the airport, and knew most of Joburg was not really safe to visit alone. When you do Joburg or Soweto get a guide. We had a very nice tour guide who spoke Setswana, one of the eleven main languages in South Africa, and excellent English. In the schools South Africans typically learn in English or Afrikaans. Our first stop was the Apartheid Museum, not a place our white friends would have wanted to take us. It was reminiscent of the Holocaust Museum in DC. At the entrance you are divided into Bantus and Blankes. Blacks and Whites. Inside the museum there was a film explaining the history of South Africa which I found very informative considering American schools don't really teach African history and I knew nothing about the Boer Wars. I vaguely remembered studying the Cape of Good Hope, but that was all. (My trip to Cape Town deserves an entirely different article). The rest of the museum was displays, video, dioramas, plaques, news clips and other media that walked you through the entire Apartheid era and up to the present. It was very informative and I'd recommend it.

We took a quick trip to an area in Joburg that reminded me of Queens. It had many little mom and pop stores with people selling things outside on the streets. We went into an African "pharmacy" with the traditional herbs, drums, rainsticks, and other "healing" items. Then we drove on to Soweto, which stands for SouthWest Townships. There are 61 townships, I believe, that make up Soweto. The first one our guide took us to was the nicest, we saw where Desmond Tutu has a house, as well as Winnie Mandela. Later in another township we saw the house where Nelson Mandela grew up. We ate lunch at a restaurant where I was told I had to experience real African food. I had experience it a little in Botswana, but this added to the fun. I had the best bread in the world with fries, on top of it, yes, on top of the bread, and egg, and sausage and pepperoni on top of that. The drive through Soweto ended at the Hector Pieterson museum where the story of a boy who was killed because he refused to learn Afrikaans and started a protest is told. He was killed in 1976, but remained a symbol of apartheid. The museum was very moving and the horrors of what human beings are capable of was reminiscent of my trip to the concentration camp in Germany.

As a person who has grown up in the melting pot of America it is very hard to understand why people are capable of crimes having to do with a person's skin color. After talking with both blacks and whites in South Africa I was able to understand perhaps where both sides were coming from. There is still animosity in the country, there is much crime, the government has issues, and things are not safe for anyone. Things that are horrible crimes in America are accepted there. The country has a lot to get through. I was able to see first hand what my friend is dealing with every day, the comments people make to her, the racist things she must deal with. It is a very different life, and I wonder if she'll ever come back to the states as there is so much for her to do in Africa. My two and a half weeks were just a smattering of life in Africa, and by the end I could see how she thought things were like America. I was enjoying the beautiful scenery and laidback lifestyles, yet I am glad to be back in America where people are motivated to do things. People are motivated to make a difference, stop racism, and make their country and world a better place. I don't think I ever appreciated America as much as I do now, oddly enough. If and when you go to South Africa expect to be surprised by the similarities and differences, but most of all enjoy yourself.