One of the biggest unknowns when I moved out here last year was Johannesburg itself, and one of the biggest surprises is illustrated in this picture, looking towards the city centre from outside my office:
Everywhere you look, you see trees: outside of the Central Business District, virtually every road is an avenue. I found this quite surprising: I wasn’t expecting to find giraffes wandering around nosing in my rubbish bin*, but I was anticipating a slightly more savanna-like ambience. In fact, this is what most of the Highveld, the mile-high plateau that Johannesburg is found in the centre of, is like – all of the trees in the cityscape above arrived with the gold miners a century ago. It turns out that the 10 million trees in the area around Johannesburg and Pretoria form one of the largest artificial forests in the world.
However the trees got here, I certainly appreciate the shade they give me on my walk into work every day. Being close enough to commute on foot has a number of advantages, not least that it means I don’t have to deal with Jo’burg traffic every day. Driving here is not for the faint-hearted – if you’re adhering to the speed limit, I can guarantee that you will be the slowest thing on the road. Undertaking is so pervasive that I actually thought that it was legal for a while. At intersections, everyone jumps the lights before they change from red. Everyone also hits the accelerator when the lights start to change from green. There are lots of intersections. I have no doubt that several collisions are hiding beneath that tranquil canopy.
*apparently, some people do come here expecting this. The mind boggles.
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