Johannesburg

I arrived in Joburg after fourteen hours of flights with lots of turbulences, feeling totally beat up. I checked in at the hotel in Craighall and didn’t do anything other than lying around, eating, drinking and having a good time in the evening with Inger and the guys from the Diamond Way Buddhist Group South Africa, who were so kind and invited me over for dinner.

Next day after breakfast I walked towards Rosebank, but after about a kilometer I learned it’s not only the safety issue that forces everyone to use other means of transportation. In my case it was the lack of sidewalks which literally forced me to use UBER. I planed to get a coffee and a second breakfast, but the load shedding made sure that not a single coffee machine was operational the time I got there and so I went to the Rosebank Rooftop Marked instead – a flea marked located on top of an indoor car park where I happened to run into a market stall from Agar’s Brewery
and which is the second best rated South African brewery (according to UNTAPPED). While tasting all the beers they had on Tap I had a nice chat with their current brewmaster Mike. He even switched kegs to enable me to drink their latest creation. Later that day I wend to the BEERHOUSE, a craft beer bar with – according to them – 99+ types of bottled beer and over two dozen beers from taps. Mike recommended it besides the Mad Giant Brewery – but since I wanted to get an overview over the most local breweries – I went north and wasn’t disappointed.

On Monday we went to the Apartheid Museum which is is nicely put together and highly recommended to visit. It’s giving an overview over the past 200 years, what led to Apartheid and the fight against it.
On the homepage it was said you need roughly two and a half hours – which is – impossible if you don’t want to hurry through it. We ourselves spent a good four hours in there and did not see everything. After the Museum we went to the Mad Giant Brewery. Not for the drinks but for the very good Tapas they serve there. The food was very good and a welcome appetizer for our visit of the Epicure in the evening. A Restaurant I had picked because it was said that they have very good African cuisine, whereas most of the fine Restaurants always serve European dishes. We went there after fetching our rental car from the Airport, which took us about three ours. Traffic in Johannesburg during the week is insane and we hoped to have better luck next day when we drove north-east to the northern end of the Drakensberg Escarpment.