![\"Jbergskyline.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Jbergskyline.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOne 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:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nEverywhere 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<\/em> 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<\/a>.
\nHowever 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.
\n*apparently, some people do come here expecting this. The mind boggles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"