Johannesburg

This is the first part of recounting our trip to South Africa in March 2025. To write this up, I recorded myself narrating our trip for 2 hours (Christine chimed in at times), then transcribed it with Google Recorder and had Google Gemini AI craft a blog entry out of the transcript. (Gemini version 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25).

Rosebank

After 27 hours of flights and a layover in London, we landed in Johannesburg in early afternoon. We took the Gautrain to the Rosebank station.

Our hotel, the Holiday Inn, was located inside the Rosebank Mall. The mall had a very familiar style, like the ones I had seen in the U.S. – fancy stores and chain restaurants along a central walkway with trees. It was just like the Grove Mall in LA, with the difference that this one had a mix of U.S. & European and South African fancy restaurants and brand stores. I had a general understanding that even countries generally considered “poor” tend to be very well off in the big cities and rich neighborhoods, but Rosebank came across as a relative surprise to us. “Wow, we are in Africa.. and this neighborhood is fancy fancy”. 

We also had a glimpse of the stark wealth gap – right off the subway exit, there were 30 poorly dressed young people sitting around with a green UberEats bag. Is there that much demand for food delivery? I never got to see someone pick up an order or take off in a bike/motorcycle with an order during our stay. They were seemingly just sitting there all day. There were also warning signs posted in the subway entrances that read “people have been getting mugged near the entrance, be alert of your surroundings”.

In past trips, we often had made the mistake of eating in an expensive, not very satisfying place shortly after landing. So Christine and I agreed that we should go somewhere basic when we land somewhere first, and save the money for nicer eating once we had settled in the city ad had a chance to assess the range of food quality. We walked around for a bit… and I made again the mistake of choosing an expensive restaurant with Turkish food. 

We got one plate each but we ended up feeling too full, and barely finished one plate. Christine striked up conversation with the waitress who was very friendly and welcoming and was surprised and excited to learn that we had just arrived from Los Angeles. She had immigrated from another neighboring country to South Africa. We talked a bit on WhatsApp afterwards.

The fact that Holiday Inn was located this fancy mall is kinda funny. In the U.S., Holiday Inn is a budget brand usually found near a highway exit, but this one is inside an expensive mall as a “4 star hotel”. It had a small pool and a restaurant with some indoor and outdoor sitting that we never got to use as we didn’t include breakfast in our hotel booking. It would have cost an additional $15 USD per person. Strangely, even though it serves food all day, we never saw anyone eating there for lunch. Our hotel room had a large deep soak bathtub which was very nice to have. But the overall room furnishing was the usual sad Holiday Inn layout, the bathroom door was broken, and the bathtub came with a weird half-length plastic divider instead of regular curtains, and it leaked water everywhere each time we took a shower. Ah.. good ol Holiday Inn. Overall, it was fine.

After a nap, we went looking for the Rosebank Sunday Market. It was at the top floor of another mall’s parking structure. It was hard to find – it’s tucked away surrounded by the rooftop parking space, away from the elevator. It felt quite touristy and prices seemed steep – comparable to LA markets – $5 t-shirts, $10 souvenirs and $30 dresses. I was crashing with jet lag and we headed back to the hotel to rest & sleep.

Christine was interested in exploring marketplaces like these to look at and touch merchandise, but unfortunately given our itinerary, this brief visit to the market in Rosebank turned out to be our only outing to a market during the entire South Africa trip. Markets open on weekends, and we only had one weekend in the middle of our trip – and we spent that one weekend in a remote cottage near the Addo National Park, away from any big cities.

Dinokeng Game Reserve

Our goal today was a self-drive safari. First, we took the Gautrain to Sandton to pick up our rental car from Sani-Sixt. Then came the real challenge for Christine: driving on the left side of the road, from the right side of the car! It requires constant mental conversion of every move.

Getting out of Sandton/Johannesburg towards Pretoria involved pristine, six-lane highways. My immediate impression is that these are arteries connecting white, affluent cities. 

I learned about the existence of Dinokeng through an Instagram reel that Christine had sent me about seeing wildlife in South Africa. And when I asked ChatGPT with help planning our South Africa trip, Dinokeng had come up along with Kruegger, so it reinforced the impression that we were on the right track.

In retrospect, we should have gone even further north to rent our car – we should have rented from the Pretoria Hertz office, only half an hour from Dinokeng, instead of Sandton Sixt. Wildlife self-guided tours are exhausting, so the less driving we do, the better. 

It took us a long time to go through the renting paperwork and logistics, and we arrived at Dinokeng around 11 am, admittedly later than the ideal time for animal sightings (early morning is best). The reserve is a mix of public land and pockets of private land (lodges, farms). While driving inside the reserve, there were many roads that were specific to a farm or a lodge, so we were not supposed to enter them. There were large pyramid-shaped stone structures placed in most crossroads that indicated the direction of the game tour path. The stone structures were numbered. The park staff gave us a self-drive tour map. However, due to recent rains that caused muds & ponds, sometimes the signage would indicate that a specific segment was no longer available. Christine drove slowly along the unpaved, often muddy road, and I was constantly checking the map to find which way we were supposed to turn.

It took a lot of focus and energy! We drove for about 3 hours. After seeing almost no animals other than birds, butterflies and some zebras, we nearly gave up, but then spotted a group of a handful of Zebras, motivating us to continue. Eventually, we saw more zebras, some wildebeest, and another horned animal. The driving was tiring on the rough roads. Our car got covered in mud. When we returned the car, the worker sounded surprised: “where did you go?!?”

Returning to Johannesburg, we stopped for gas and got ripped off with a $50 charge to fill the gas. The cleaning crew offered to wipe the windows, and upcharged us. A tiring but interesting second day.

Downtown Johannesburg

The internet is full of stories about how certain countries in the world are dangerous and that tourists should avoid them. If you look closely at these internet myths, some of the patterns that emerge is that the more immigrants and black people are in the area, the more infamous is the region in internet lore. I live in one of those “dangerous places”. Los Angeles, and California in general. “Be careful when you are in California. Don’t go out at night – especially in places like K-Town, South Central LA, East LA,” online “experts” advise. They will not admit it, but in the back of their mind it’s dangerous because there are too many immigrants and black people. White states and suburbs, on the other hand, are supposedly so safe. 

South Africa is one of them, and their campaign of terror seems to target Johannesburg, the downtown area, and the commuter Metro train. There was so much anti-metro narrative on the internet that I could never get ChatGPT to agree with me that taking the train was fine with reasonable precautions.

We headed to downtown via Gautrain to buy water-resistant shoes for both of us. Rain was forecasted during the next few days. Our plan was to buy shoes in downtown and then take the Metro train heading west. We walked from Park Station towards Braamfontein, where we expected to see a market. The downtown area looked very neglected – sidewalk bricks were bizarrely wavy (up and down) and broken in places, as if damaged by an earthquake and never repaired. There was trash on the sidewalks and general lack of upkeep. Stores were boarded up. It wasn’t bustling, just people commuting.

I read up on some tips on how to stay alert in the streets. Keep walking, don’t be looking up at the buildings, don’t look at the map on my phone while out in the public – since these are clear signs that you are a tourist. So I looked at the map while inside stores, and tried to stay course while walking.

There was no market. Apparently it opens during weekends only. I noticed that the area of the market – Braamfontein – suddenly seemed fancier than the area we had walked through earlier. We decided to have breakfast at the corner KFC. The KFC stuck out so much from the rest of downtown – slick, self-service kiosks, with very strange decorations for the seating booths. Then I noticed there were people standing in the corners with bright green vests. They were Braamfontein’s “tourism ambassadors”. It seemed that their job was standing around, presumably to provide a sense of security. Without them, the area would be even more deserted.

Afterwards Christine stepped into an unexpectedly deep puddle of water and her shoes got soaked! We each bought new shoes and took the taxi back to our hotel.

We had lunch at a Thai restaurant inside the Rosebank mall. The experience of eating Thai food here was much better than our previous experience trying to find Thai food or Chinese food in Chile. The food was more authentic, dishes were not afraid of making it spicy, and they didn’t do ridiculous attempts to “localize” the dish to appeal to risk-averse consumers, like in Chile. Man, Chile was a trip.

In the afternoon we took a taxi to the Carnivore Restaurant, about a 16-mile, hour-long drive away in the suburbs. ChatGPT had recommended it for trying unusual meats like crocodile, ostrich, buffalo and other game meats. The ride took us through some very poor areas and richer suburbs, including stretches of the city with non-functional or missing traffic lights at intersections. Drivers just “winged it” on when to take their turn to cross.

Carnivore itself was a bit strange. It’s part of a larger, gated resort/conference complex, likely aimed at tourist groups. It felt very secluded. We needed a reservation (luckily, we could make one), and the place was practically empty. We figured that since not many tourists come, they only open the restaurant when there’s enough interest on that day – and that’s why they “require a reservation”. While the experience of trying various meats served tableside on skewers was unique, we later realized many Johannesburg restaurants offer similar game meats, perhaps making the dedicated trip less essential. It felt a bit like a tourist trap.