Main Street Life

By Zachariah.

Joburg is a melting pot of the old and new, tribal heritage, colonial past and it's multi-cultural future. It is a sprawl of urban diversity, falling apart in pockets and patches but being continually rebuilt and reimagined. Randburg was wealthy, clean and ordered/ cold. Soweto was shambolic, warm and busy. Downtown was dirty, rough and dangerous but also scattered with street art, trendy shops and cool café's. We booked an AirBnB a couple of blocks from the bus station in the arts district to make life easy for the following days travel to Groot Marico.

Fox Street was a piece of Melbourne welded to a New York caricature. Bars and café's clustered along a three block stretch along with a backpackers, trendy vintage stores and even an organic grocer. One street either side and you find yourself back in the thick of downtown Joburg, where the bottle shops keep all their stock behind a cage and you order through a little window or you find yourself suddenly locked inside of a corner store because the power cuts out and the owners panic (true story). We wandered away from Fox Street in search of a supermarket and quickly wandered back, deciding whatever we could find in the corner store was good enough.

In the middle of the chaos is the beginnings of Joburg's gentrification. But not in a wealthy white people buying up cheap property kind of way. The bars, shops and apartment block are full of (predominantly) African's and a mostly under thirties crowd. It's everything you might expect from an arts district in Melbourne, New York or London, if somewhat smaller.  The alleys and side streets house murals and installations. But the best is our accommodation. Main Street Life is part apartment block, part hotel, part art gallery. We explore various installations throughout the building, eventually finding our way to the rooftop which houses a bar and three-hundred-sixty degree views of the city. Sadly for us it was a Tuesday night and we had the rooftop to ourselves but we spent some time sighting the many murals that climb the high rise buildings and watched the sun set before heading back down to the street.

We grab a drink at one of the bars before assembling a dinner of cheese, antipasto, wine and beer bread that we baked ourselves (from the organic grocer that I couldn't resist). Next morning we explore the cafes. I am obsessed with the one operating out of a converted Chevrolet truck but they only serve instant coffee so we end up at the retro-fitted shipping container next door. After feeding our caffeine addiction we head back to the apartment to pack and plan on getting to the bus station an hour early. Plenty of time in case there's any issues, you know, because of the bus strike…

This time we have found a company not affected by the strike and bought tickets online so we're good to go. We get to the station with an hour to spare and start looking for the ticket office to ask where the bus leaves from. Only when we find a sign up saying the office is closed because of the strike and a bunch of guys surrounding it immediately begin to offer us various modes of transport. One guy actually tried to sell us a flight. We manage to get away from them and call the bus company whose phone answer message informs us that due to the bus strike and protests at Park station Johannesburg services will be departing from Midrand instead. Information that would have been useful in the email they sent us with the tickets considering Midrand is a half hours drive away. From there it was a mad and stressful scramble to find a taxi and intercept the bus in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa about an hour away (our taxi did it in 30 mins).

Joburg taught us some valuable lessons about travelling in Africa that would be reinforced again and again as we go. Mainly that you can be as organised as you want but you had best be ready to roll with the changes because the odd bits of information you can find are very probably wrong and nothing runs to schedule here. Just show up (early) and go with it.