Today was our only full day in Johannesburg. Most travel guides suggest that there isn’t much to see in the city with the exception of the Apartheid museum so we decided to pay it a visit. On purchasing a ticket, each person is randomly classified as “white” or “non-white” and there are separate entrances accordingly. The first section of the museum remains separated and this sets the tone right from the start. The museum is vast and split into two parts – an exhibition focussing on Nelson Mandela and one about the apartheid itself. Both are fascinating and packed full of information and exhibits, but also made very hard reading at times. In the end we spent over four hours looking around and even then didn’t manage to see everything.

After lunch at the museum we took a short drive to Arts on Main in the centre of Johannesburg. Driving around the middle of town is challenging to say the least and makes London seem easy – at least we have painted lines and rules that are actually followed! After a scenic route through lots of mini one way systems we finally found Arts On Main which is a collection of art galleries, stalls and cafes recommended to us by the American couple we met in Kruger. The best day of the week to visit is Sunday, so only a small percentage of the galleries were open while we were there. We spent some time walking around and talking to one of the photographers for “shotinjburg” – a scheme which gives young people from more deprived backgrounds the skills and opportunities to photograph unusual views of Johannesburg and sell their work.

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This evening we met Claire (Kat’s boyfriend’s sister) and her boyfriend (Shaun) for dinner at Moya, a traditional African restaurant. The food was excellent and we even participated some face painting done.

Unfortunately that is where our relatively positive experience of Johannesburg came to an abrupt end. On returning to the hotel we found that someone had been in both our rooms at the guest house and stolen my laptop, Hannah’s mobile and Shammy’s iPod. The guest house is very well secured and there had been no sign of a break-in so we are fairly sure that either the staff or one of the guests was responsible. Although we notified the police they couldn’t give us any idea of when somebody would be able to come. The owner of the hotel arrived followed by their private security company, and claimed that two guests had left the hotel unexpectedly without checking out earlier this evening. Nevertheless, we decided that we didn’t feel safe in the hotel and moved to the Intercontinental in Sandton for the night. As if the evening hadn’t been eventful enough already, a parked police patrol car tried to wave us down on the way to Sandton. Fake and corrupt police are known to operate here and being stopped by police on a motorway at 2am seemed a little unusual so we took the decision to ignore them and carry on. They didn’t try to follow us so hopefully it was the right thing to do!

Our only full day Johannesburg has certainly been an experience. We purchase viagra leave tomorrow to join the growing group of wedding guests ready for the big day on Sunday!