Johannesburg is the largest city in South Africa and is completely different from Cape Town. Joburg resembled LA or New York and was a bit overwhelming. It was storming the night we where there, which was the first storm I had been in since being in South Africa. After we ate dinner in the city, we were walking around trying to find a place to buy shampoo and other toiletries. All of us got a bad vibe from the city and felt scared walking around as white American girls. You have to be careful in Cape Town as well, but I just felt much more vulnerable being in Joburg. After Harry, our hostel owner, picked us up we begin an intense conversation with Harry about race. He told us how his parent left to move in America because they had personal experience with violence growing up and how he went to a school with all white people and felt like he had to constantly prove himself to the white children. He also mentioned to us how Cape Town is seen as extremely more racist than Joburg and that fact keep a lot of black people to stay in Johannesburg.
The following day continued our cultural experience as we went to the famous apartheid museum. Its hard to describe in the world the effects you feel from the museum. It was an extremely eye opening experience and I learned the difficulties that blacks had to face during this time. It is great that apartheid has ended, but after living in South Africa for two months, racial segregation is still extremely prevalent, and the country has along way to go before it can forget about it horrifying past.
Kruger National Park
The third leg of our trip was off to Kruger to experience our first safari. We started our day off bright and early at 6 am. For the next 12 hours we were in safari car searching for the Big Five. The highlights of our day included seeing zebras up close, watching a family of giraffes feeding on leaves, witnessing the feeding of a hyena cub by its mother, and feeling like I was in Jurassic Park!
The animals that we saw included impala, zebras, giraffes, buffalo, elephants, rhino, baboons, hippos, dung beetle, hyenas and multiple relatives of the deer. Sadly the lions and leopards were not caught by any of our eyes, but that just gives me an excuse to go back to Kruger later in my life!
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