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After taking a look at the nice beach outside Maputo we returned to the "safety" of Swaziland. The next day we took the bus to Johannesburg and stayed the night at the Drifters Inn. On our final day in South Africa we went on a guided tour of Johannesburg before flying home to Norway in the evening.

South African Adventure 1999, Part 11: From Swaziland back to Johannesburg and home to Oslo

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-08 20:37:40

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.....This is our viaaagra....It iiiss tradiiitional.....It iiss wooorking...It iiss wooorking....."

According to him, this "traditional" medicine was now being accepted more and more by real doctors all over the world. We have our doubts about this, though.....I know that personally I wouldn't let any of this "traditional" stuff anywhere near my body, unless all other hope was gone and I was going to die anyway :-)

To our great relief, the vehicle was still parked outside when we returned. After driving around some more in downtown Johannesburg, we finally stopped at the Carlton Centre. There was a huge luxury hotel here, called the Carlton Hotel, but it was now closed (or "no longer functioning", as Simba called it). It actually had to close because of the high crime rate! People were quite simply afraid of staying in downtown Johannesburg, so the the hotel weren't attracting many guests. Most tourists were now staying in the northern suburbs (like us), without venturing into the city center at all.

Fortunately, you could still come to the top floor of the Carlton Centre to have a great view of the city, which is what we did. The view from the 50th floor was really fantastic. I'm not sure how far we could actually see, but it was quite far, and once again we could see how huge Johannesburg actually was.

We spent around twenty minutes at the top of the Carlton Centre. We were inside a room but all of the walls were just windows, so nothing was obstructing the view. Really fun to see how small everything looked down at the pavement. It sort of looked so nice and peaceful that it was hard to believe that down there was one of the most criminal areas in the world. The view reminded me a lot of the view from the Empire State building in New York, though perhaps not quite that good.

Down at street level, we walked the short distance back to our car. I was holding a firm grip on my video camera while walking, ...