After an 11 hour overnight journey, uneventful but uncomfortable, it was so good to be met by Lucy (my sister Sophie's daughter) at Jo'burg airport and whisked away to her most civilized home she shares with Bongani in Melville. It is recently modernised and has quite a bit of garden and lots of space inside. I fear our future home won't come anywhere near this standard but it is a few days for us to recover our strength and acclimatize as well as to acquire a hire car, mobile phones with local SIM cards, plugs for our gadgets and so on.
The hire car had been booked but Avis had not sent the extra charge for it being collected from De Aar. This turned out to be about £500, much more than the cost of hire for 8 days so the agent himself was horrified and refused to allow us to do this. He asked whether we might return the car to Kimberley and get the bus or a lift back to De Aar. So we will somehow but it is about 300km away so no mean thing.
Lucy is out at work all day but Bongani is revising for an exam so has been able to do things with us most helpfully. He left us at the Botanical Gardens where we had a long walk reducing the swollen ankles from the flight. It is a huge park with lawns sloping down to several lakes, rose gardens and exotic trees.
Another outing with Bongani has been to Soweto, seeing the homes of Mandela, Tutu and what is now a great variety of housing for those less well off. It has a very African feel, akin to our link town Batlharos and totally unlike the comfortable suburbs of Jo'burg where we have driven through beuatiful streets lined with flowering jacaranda: one afternoon to have tea with Nola Park and her two children - they lived in Thatcham until 2 years ago, returning to her home city with some trepidation. They have a good life and have settled down well.
To return to our visit to Soweto - we spent a good while in the Hector Pietersen Museum, reminding ourselves of the horrors of what happened in 1976 when schoolchildren rebelled against being forced to learn in Afrikaans. Hector Pietersen was the 12 year old lad pictured in the famous iconic photograph being carried after he was shot . He was one of many who died when police shot at the protesters.
Temperatures have risen during our 3 days here, into the high 20sC, with glorious sunshine and a lovely breeze.
