Pretoria - The Boer JerusalemJan 30, 2009
|
|
| Pretoria 1 We drove eastbound on the N4 towards Pretoria. It is a pretty expensive highway – we had to stop at about 4 different tolls and pay 120 rand, or about $15 Canadian. It was a little frustrating since the highway was under construction almost the whole way. We were delayed and the bottom of our car was covered in tar by the time we reached Pretoria. As we neared Pretoria we passed road signs warning drivers not to pull over or stop due to the risk of carjackers. Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, is only 50km away from Johannesburg. When Jo’burg took a turn for the worse in the 1980s and became a notoriously dangerous city, businesses and citizens moved north to Pretoria. Now the highway between the two cities is lined with corporate offices and residential developments. Jo’burg’s downtown became a ghost town, while Pretoria’s flourished with an influx of new tenants and capital. Now, Pretoria is an attractive town of 1.65 million with a large student population, nice park spaces, and with a friendlier, safer feel than Johannesburg. It’s hard to believe that this was once the headquarters of the apartheid state. We prefer to think of it as the site of Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration. Due to Johannesburg’s dangerous reputation, many tourists decide to stay in Pretoria instead. There is a lot of accommodation, including numerous backpackers. We chose the easiest one to find and ended up at the 1322 Hostel. This hostel had a strange little sci-fi themed write up in our Coast 2 Coast guidebook, so we weren’t sure what to expect. It was fine as it turns out. We’ve put our tent away for good and went for the double room. We are sharing a common bathroom and shower still, and we realized that we’ve had only one night with an ensuite since leaving Cape Town. The hostel had a pool, a small bar and a nice common eating area. The employees/owners gave us tour info and directions to some of the local sights. I am a little embarrassed to admit that we spent our first day in Pretoria at the massive Melwyn shopping mall. The mall wasn’t really that nice – not like some of those crazy luxury malls in the UAE. The hostel workers kept naming it as a local sight, and we went there in search of WiFi and a post office. We’ve carrying a few extra items including heavy wooden carvings and masks and bottles of booze, and have to figure out some way of getting all this stuff home. We decided to buy a couple cheap duffle bags that we would fill with our souvenirs. Rebecca will then bring them home when she returns to Stu and Desiree’s wedding in a month. We had signed up for the group braai dinner that night, thinking it would be one of our last South African barbeques and also a good way to meet some of the other guests. The other guests turned out to be a group of Peace Corps volunteers that were so annoying and mind-numbingly boring that from then on we referred to them as the peace corpses. We’ve got a few more days here and we’ve signed up for a tour of Johannesburg and the Soweto Township tomorrow. We are really looking forward to this tour – it should be a good one. |
Advertisement 
|
