Note: The following entry is taken from my travel journals during a stopover in South Africa in 1995, and parts ot the text have been updated. In general, it still needs editing and is written in a very rough note form. At the time, I was travelling home with my father after a tour of Australia.

After the tour finished, we were given a little time to wander around by ourselves,and most of us simply chose to head for the cafeteria for a bite to eat. Dad and I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, and when I mentioned this to Tracey she said that she had already managed to book herself on a minicab tour of Jo'burg and that she would be happy to ask the driver if we could come along when he turned up at the front gate of Gold Reef City to collect her. Of course, sod's law being what it is, nothing ever turns out to be this easy. In order to go off on the minicab tour with Tracey, we would have had to wait for our tour bus back to the airport to return and pay the driver for the tour, because we hadn't paid in advance. Much to our annoyance, the bus got stuck in traffic and was late arriving, and Tracey's minicab refused to wait for us. Luckily, though, the driver of our tour bus took pity on us and explained that she had been known to do the occasional city tour on the side herself - so we made arrangements for her to drop the bus off and then return to the airport to collect us for a private tour in her own car. If any of this sounds slightly surreal, then don't worry - it was.

Our driver, whose name I couldn't even begin to pronounce, has lived in Johanesburg all her life and was able to take us to each area of the city and tell us about it in detail - far more detail, in fact, than you would expect a mere resident of the area to know. She had clearly done her research. What I really liked, though, was the personal element - since we weren't on any sort of organised tour, we had the guide's full attention and she clearly took great pleasure in treating us like friends throughout rather than clients. After driving up to the top of a hill and being invited to step out onto a verge and look at Johaesburg sprawled out below us, we went on to Nelson Mandela's mansion and drove through Soweto, the famous collection of townships in the south western corner of the city. Soweto, in fact, is not actually an African name as you might expect, but is simply an acronym for South Western Townships in the same lazy way that Kyoto in Japan is simply an anagram of Tokyo - actually, this is more to do with the arrangement of Kanji letters that make up Tokyo and Kyoto, but that's a story for another day. Soweto was born from the policy of the South African government of forcing black South Africans further and further out of town, finally segregating them into communities of their own during the days of Apartheid when much of the city of Johannesburg was legally designated as whites only. Soweto became the focus of international attention in June 1976 through the Soweto Uprisings - in the eyes of the people, the government had finally gone too far by insisting that all black Africans should be educated in Afrikaans, thereby further separating them from world society. Lessons such as maths were to be taught exclusively by teachers speaking Afrikaans. Ironically, black South Africans had long stated that they preferred to be educated in English rather than Afrikaans for the simple reason that it had become associated with apartheid and this was something they obviously didn't want to have anything to do with. In the Soweto township of Orlando, police opened fire on ten thousand students who were taking part in a peaceful march and over five hundred people were killed. In the riots that followed, people were found stoned to death and left with signs hanging around their necks warning of worse to come. As a result, the world finally decided that it had to pay some serious attention to the situation in South Africa, sanctions were placed on the country by just about everybody, and for quite some time Soweto found itself at the centre of a political tug of war between South Africa and the rest of the world. Although it was a long time coming, Soweto was the beginning of the end for Apartheid.

For lunch, we were taken to a small cafe and cake shop on the outskirts of the city. Again, this was something which you wouldn't expect on a large group tour, as we sat over coffee and pastries and chatted about the city and life in South Africa as though we'd just gone for a drink with a friend. The owner of the cafe obviously knew our driver, and as we left he just waved a friendly goodbye and said that he would take payment from her later - this was a friendly side to the city which I had not expected, especially as I come from London where you can generally expect to be told to eff off simply for daring to look at the headline on a newspaper without actually buying it. At no point did our driver ask for any payment from us for the drinks or cakes we had eaten in the cafe - I supposed that she must have factored it into the cost of the tour, although she didn't try to tell us what we could choose and it was perhaps lucky for her that we hadn't been starving at that point. There was a small shop attached to the cafe, and people had to go through the seating area to get to it, so there was a constant march of pedestrians wandering through as we ate, smiling as they passed and wishing us a good morning. For a moment, it actually made me feel good about South Africa and showed me a side of the country which was nothing like the one depicted on television back home.

Unfortunately, some of the places we were shown after we'd finished eating brought me firmly back down to Earth. For every place we went where people were smiling and strolling along without a care in the world, we would turn down another street and our driver would advise us that we should probably duck down as we drove along because otherwise we might get shot. It seemed that there were streets where you could happily wander along browsing in the shops, and just around the corner there were others where sudden death was just something you had to put up with on a daily basis. I suppose I should have expected this, and, to be fair, there are also areas in the USA where the police are scared to go. Dad tells a story, for example, about a time when he was walking down the street in New York looking for a particular tourist destination when a patrol car pulled up beside him and the officers inside asked who he was - he was then advised that this really wasn't an area he wanted to be walking in, and driven back to the hotel. So in that respect, I suppose Johannesburg is no different from certain other big cities.

We had to be back at the airport in plenty of time to check in for our flight, of course, so we cut the tour short and were driven back in the early evening. Our flight home should've been a depressing affair, as I certainly didn't want to be returning to England. Instead, the atmosphere was lightened somewhat by a conversation behind me in which an elderly woman was trying to calm a young lady who had clearly never flown before and wasn't particularly looking forward to the experience:

"What's that for?"

"That calls the flight attendant, dear. Don't push that."

"What's that noise?"

"That's just the engines starting up, dear. That's a good thing."

"How can the captain concentrate on flying and talk to us on the intercom at the same time?"

"Just go to sleep, dear"

This conversation went on, at intervals, for some time into the flight. Then it stopped suddenly, so I assume that either the nervous passenger had finally drifted off to sleep or that her elderly companion had killed her.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.