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Published: January 20th 2011
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19-12-2010
Johannesburg would have attracted me like a magnet when its gold and diamond mines were going strong, but now they are defunct.
Take away the mines and what tourist interest does Johannesburg have?
“None”
Of course, some artificial tourist attractions have been created – like The Sun City, which is just a casino and the Gold Reef City, which is an ‘amusement park’ with the usual paraphernalia of roller-coaster rides.
Well, we are not gamblers and getting wrung out from inside out on a roller-coaster ride is NOT my idea of ‘amusement’.
The Pilanesburg Park too, which is near the Sun City, pales in comparison with the Kruger N.P. especially, as I described it to Avi, “Stone animals inside the Sun City and ‘stoned’ ones outside in Pilanesburg” because I suspect that the ‘big five’ at Pilanesburg are caged during the night and tranquilized during the day. How else can they guarantee the viewing of these five? The viewing of really wild animals cannot be guaranteed, right?
At the Gold Reef City, they do take you to 720 feet below the surface in an old gold mine shaft and pour out the gold
as a demo when you are back on the surface. They have also thrown in a Miners’ dance to amuse you.
Despite all these allurements, we were feeling quite queasy just reading about it because we had taken an ‘underground city’ tour in Turkey recently and had suffered claustrophobia and it was not a pleasant experience. I mean, when you are deep under the ground, all the time you are apprehensive that the shaft may collapse, or there might be a cave-in and you may get trapped under the ground and you do not want to be there when it happens.
So, we gave up both the major tourist attractions of Johannesburg – the Sun City and the Gold Reef City.
So, why one should visit Johannesburg at all, especially since it is doubly as expensive as the Cape Town? Transport, hotels, shopping, everything is double the price as compared to the Cape Town.
However, Johannesburg Airport is the hub of South African Airlines and you can’t very well transit through it four times without ever visiting the city. Moreover, we had planned to visit Victoria Falls during the Full Moon period and had to kill
two days in between.
So, we stayed in a very expensive Melrose Arch hotel and did a ‘city sightseeing tour’.
I had already developed a sort of anathema towards Johannesburg and found that it was well-founded. We did not like the city at all, and visiting it, in my own humble opinion, was a total waste of time, energy and money.
South Africa has the second highest crime in the world. (Columbia has the highest. India lags behind at number 17, which made me happy.) Nowhere it is more obvious than at Johannesburg. The ‘posh’, beautiful parts of the town are comprised of ‘gated’ communities, i.e. those protected by high walls, electric fences, security cameras etc. The ‘downtown’ is taken over by the drug cartels and one could see that it is dominated by all sorts of unsavory characters.
The only interesting things were the Nelson Mandela Square, the mining equipment display in the center of the town and a statue of a very young M.K. Gandhi. I could not recognize him till I read the inscription. I mean, we are used to seeing him as an old, bald, dhoti-clad man with spectacles, a walking stick
and a toothless, charming smile - ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ - and it was difficult to reconcile this image with his statue - with hair on head, a moustache, lawyer’s robes worn over trousers and a grim, determined expression on his face.
All in all, we disliked Johannesburg and were glad to be off to the ‘legendary’ Victoria Falls.
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