South Africa Map for Johannesburg and Pretoria
Jim and I flew into Johannesburg for the beginning of our trip to South Africa and Namibia in 1997. At that time, just a few years after Apartheid, South Africa was already somewhat dangerous, but not so bad as it later became. We explored the city for a few days, then pickup up a car and went on to Pretoria, and then north and west of this area into Kruger National Park and other destinations. I've divided up the non-urban photos approximately equally between Johannesburg and Pretoria. So Kruger Park is included here, with photos of Johannesburg, and other rural areas in the north of the country that we visited are with Pretoria. This is all somewhat random, I admit.
The "just the best" photos mainly show the animals we saw in Kruger Park.
Many thanks to Jim for scanning all these photos and sending them to me.
Photo List (Total 90 Photos)
Click bolded headers below to view, or click "just the best" for quick tour
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Johannesburg City (20 photos) - A small number of photos from the actual city. Not that Johannesburg is ugly or anything, but it certainly suffers from being located away from any body of water. It's located where it is because it began life as a mining town, so there is no lake, no river, no ocean to orient yourself to.
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Kruger National Park (66 photos) - We stayed a few days in this famous park. Apart from the areas where you stay overnight (in very comfortable and charming rondawels), you are not supposed to leave your car. What you do is drive around, slowly, and watch for animals. The park is a little over three times the size of Prince Edward Island. We saw lots of animals, from beautiful birds and turtles to rhinos, lions, giraffes and hippos. My favourites were and remain the warthogs, though.
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Bloemfontein (4 photos) - Jim and I drove from the cape across the country on our way back to Johannesburg to fly home. We spent a night in Bloemfontein, a city that reminds me very much of Regina. It is full of kitschy 1960's architecture, and lies in the middle of what appears to a grasslands of South Africa. It is the capital of the Free State, formerly the Orange Free State. In Bloemfontein I had one of my best museum experiences ever, in that a museum had displays that were so dated and offensive that they had put up little signs saying that they would be removed as soon as funds became available. It was a fascinating place.
