The editor of Classic Wine, a new bi-monthly magazine for South African wine-lovers, asked me to write an article on "inner-city sights" in Johannesburg (to run with a complementary piece on Cape Town). Never mind that the Cape is obviously more wine- and tourism-oriented than my home town ... I also found myself asking, Where is Joburg's "inner city"?

 

Nobody knows where the Johannesburg city centre is any more.

In Cape Town, the “City Bowl”, the “CBD” and the “inner city” are concentric circles – and, thanks to the mountains and the sea, things will stay like that indefinitely. In Durban, Port Elizabeth and smaller coastal cities, the geographical limitations are less severe, yet the high-rise buildings still cluster towards the shore. Heck, even in Bloemfontein and Pretoria there is consensus about where to go when you’re alone and life is making you lonely (“Downtown”, of course).

But in Joburg, as Ivan Vladislavic writes, the boundaries are forever “drifting away, lodging in tenuous places, slipping again” – which means that the centre is always shifting too. I’ve been known, after some creative calculation (and a few glasses of wine), to claim that my house is in the exact centre of the greater Johannesburg megalopolis; yet it’s also slap-bang in the middle of suburbia and, I can assure you, we don’t get any tourists there.

Before Britain and Argentina went to war over them in 1982, hardly anyone had heard of the Falkland Islands. This small archipelago, located some 450 kilometres off the coast of South America, has been the subject of much dispute for centuries now – yet it remains a fairly obscure and (for the most part) quiet corner of the world.

Recently, prospectors have suggested that the Falklands would make an ideal base for mining oil and gas offshore, renewing tensions between the two countries over the vexed question of sovereignty. There’s little agreement, however, over what has historically made the islands so desirable.

Riverdance, that quintessentially Irish phenomenon, is onstage in South Africa for the first time. Sure, we’ve had plenty of Irish dancing over the years – multiple visits from spin-off shows like Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance and David King’s Spirit of the Dance – but Riverdance is the original and is still held to be the more ‘authentic’ production.

What started off as an interval piece at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 (held in Dublin that year) rapidly grew into a full-length music and dancing extravaganza: an exhibition of traditional Irish dancing such as had never been seen before, and which became the Emerald Isle’s major cultural export of the 1990s. In Riverdance the improbable foot and leg movements of the distinctive Irish dancing style, multiplied by twenty dancers and performed perfectly synchronised, are accompanied by Bill Whelan’s composition – tunes that are both joyous and full of pathos, by turns invigorating and haunting.

For most high end leisure travellers to or in South Africa, the phrases “community-owned” and “community-run” set red lights flashing and alarm bells ringing. It’s all very well to make a brief township tour, brave the novelty of an overnight stay in a rural B&B or browse through the quaint produce on offer at a craft market – but if you want to travel in style, stay in luxury and enjoy the best of the best, private commercial service providers are a safer bet.

That, at least, is the orthodox (albeit unspoken) wisdom in the tourism industry. It speaks to various assumptions about what is meant by experiencing a country. For people from developed countries travelling in the developing world, this leaves two implicit options: either you can really interact with the citizens and try to live as the locals do – which equates to “slumming it” – or you can enjoy your creature comforts, in which case you’ll be prevented from engaging with their “authentic” way of life.

Archaeologists tell us that the world’s great metropolises have been thousands of years in the making. It’s a familiar pattern: early human settlements grew into villages, villages became towns, towns developed into cities and, in turn, sprawling conurbations. This model is borne out in common cliché – after all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Johannesburg, then, is something of an anomaly. Admittedly, it’s an exaggeration to claim (as casual histories usually do) that the city “sprang up overnight”. But it is fair to say that Joburg, eGoli, the City of Gold, grew faster than any major world city in the early 1900s. It went from mining camp to sky-scraping urban centre in just a couple of decades – the kind of exponential and, arguably, artificial growth that wouldn’t be seen again until the recent Dubai construction boom.

When James Peech relocated from Britain to South Africa, he didn’t think he’d be opening a hotel in the middle of Johannesburg.

After a lengthy spell curing their mutual wanderlust in south-east Asia, Peech and his South African partner Cassie Janisch planned to return to her homeland and settle in Cape Town. The Cape, however, did not prove hospitable to their ambitions for the hospitality industry and they decided to try their luck in (ostensibly less tourist-friendly) Jo’burg instead.

There’s a famous line from the cult film and TV series, Star Trek, in which Dr Spock warns Captain James Kirk about a new alien life form they have encountered: “It’s life, Jim ... but not as we know it.” 

A few years ago, when I told a friend I would be travelling to Morocco, he reminded me that I shouldn’t expect the country to be at all similar to South Africa just because they are part of the same land mass. “It’s Africa, Jim,” he affirmed, “... but not as we know it.”

Sun City occupies an ambiguous place in the minds of many South Africans.

On the one hand, it symbolises glitz, glamour and family fun, while the architectural excesses of the Lost City complex represent Sol Kerzner’s entrepreneurial daring. On the other hand, located in the former ‘black homeland’ of Bophuthatswana, it has its origins in apartheid’s Bantustan system. In recent years – as other casino complexes have sprung up around the country – it has been unable to escape the tawdriness often associated with gambling venues.

There are those who will tell you that it doesn’t matter how you spend your time in the bush, or where you stay – it’s enough simply to be there. To some degree, this is true; certainly, no matter what your accommodation and game-viewing is like, it’s better than being in the office. After only a few hours at Exeter River Lodge in the Sabi Sand private game reserve, however, I couldn’t help reflecting that it was different to any bush experience I’d enjoyed before.

 

It happens to everyone who encounters animals in the African bushveld, from the most experienced game ranger to the first-timer “on safari”.

We see a giraffe munching on leaves and think of a baseball player chewing gum. Lionesses with cubs look to us like any human mothers of triplets would – exhausted, exasperated, while their broods run playfully over and around them. Spotting an elephant stripping the bark off a broken branch by rotating it carefully in his mouth, we find ourselves stuck between similes: is he like a craftsman, turning a piece of wood in a lathe; or a guy watching rugby on TV, working away at a tough stick of biltong? A group of young male buffalo, separated from the herd, remind us of a gang of moody, testosterone-filled teenage boys. A lone leopard, knowing no territorial boundaries and roaming over hundreds of kilometres, is Clint Eastwood or James Dean – an outlaw, a rebel without a cause.

The fire that gutted the Rissik Street Post Office in downtown Johannesburg last year, turning the 113-year old building into a blackened shell, sparked renewed interest in the question: do Joburgers care about their architectural heritage?

After all, the iconic façade is almost as old as the city itself, and its neglect over the years – it had been boarded up and frequently vandalised since 1996 – seemed to reflect an indifferent attitude towards the (comparatively few) centenarian constructions in South Africa’s largest city. Some even suggested that it should be demolished.

Of course, the ‘build ’em up, bash ’em down’ mentality is well entrenched in Jozi. Sixty years ago, Herman Charles Bosman – an ardent Joburg flâneur – was already complaining about his fellow citizens’ propensity to flatten any building that was more than a few decades old.

 

A cursory glance at some of South Africa’s place names seems to suggest a minor national obsession with royalty.

Chiefs, ubukhosi and other traditional leaders provide one set of descriptors – from the new King Shaka International Airport near Durban, to the Chief Maqoma heritage route in the Eastern Cape and 2010 FIFA World Cup venue the Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg.

Then there are the designations that date back to the colonial era and the days before the country became a republic, alluding to successive generations of British monarchs: King William’s Town (that’s William IV), George (King George III, in case you were wondering), Queenstown (named after Victoria), Prince Albert (after her husband), Port Edward and Kind Edward School in Johannesburg (in honour of a visit in 1925 by the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII) ... well, you get the point.

 

There are hundreds of luxury game lodges across South Africa offering visitors the chance to “experience the bushveld”. Undoubtedly, there is a lot to be said for the five-star safari option – but does being waited on hand and foot really constitute an authentic bushveld experience? And what if you can’t afford to pay thousands of rands per night? Some national parks have basic accommodation, and there is always the alternative of staying in a nearby town or resort and driving into the park each day ... but that’s also not the ideal way to “experience the bushveld”. 

Fortunately, there is another option, as my family and I recently discovered on a trip to the Madikwe Game Reserve near the border between South African and Botswana. It goes by the name of Mosetlha Bush Camp. 

Human beings need stereotypes. They help us to simplify things, to make sense of a world that would otherwise be far too complex. Unfortunately, of course, stereotypes usually derive from prejudiced assumptions; as South Africans, we are all too familiar with prejudice on the basis of race, gender, language and so on.

But there is another form of stereotyping that operates in our society, one that tends to remain unchallenged: regional (or geographical) prejudice. According to this logic, South Africans can be categorised according to the cities they inhabit. So there are, for instance, the laid-back but sophisticated coastal types, who enjoy the arts and fine living and outdoor leisure; and there are the sincere but dull inland types, who either live in pretty but boring rural areas or in urban environments that lack charm or redeeming natural features.

And then there are the people who choose to live in Johannesburg. “What could possibly possess them to do so?” their compatriots wonder. “The place has no history, no culture, no distinctive architectural style apart from Afro-Tuscan security complexes, no entertainment options apart from shopping malls and bars and restaurants. And the crime ...”

 

As we passed through the entrance to the Victoria Falls, it was there to greet us again: the ubiquitous, mysterious bird that appears on Zimbabwe’s national flag and coat of arms, as well as in countless sculptures and statuettes across the country.

There was some disagreement amongst our group as to the bird’s provenance. Two Zimbabweans were at loggerheads. One insisted that it was a purely mythical creature, based on soapstone renderings found at the ruins of the Dzimba dza mabwe, or Great Zimbabwe; the other felt that it depicted a real bird species – but couldn’t remember which one. So the South Africans offered some (admittedly unhelpful) suggestions: a fisheagle? A francolin? A griffin-like composite of different species?