South Africa 2025 – Part 1, Days 1-3. Flights, London, Johannesburg

So Yes, I did go to South Africa earlier this summer, and “Write South Africa Trip Recaps” has been on my to do list since then, but for whatever reason I’ve been finding it hard to get it all down. Well last week, my sister in law sent me a picture:

She FINALLY got the postcard that I sent her. It took two months. And she’s in Amsterdam, so who knows when the post cards to America will arrive…. But I think her text gave me a bit of a kick in the butt to not wait for motivation (and fittingly because I was pondering the subject of motivation earlier this year) , and just sit and write South Africa recaps. So here we go…

TLDR: South Africa is an amazing country – it’s history is both prehistoric and very recent, which makes it feel very different from any other country that I’ve visited. We saw a lot of beautiful, wonderful things, and we saw a lot of really heart breaking, hard things. Wherever we went, though, our guides were willing to talk to us honestly and openly. My advice for anyone going to South Africa, is to do so in a way that allows you to connect with South Africans, to hear their stories about their past and about their thoughts and dreams for the future. Also – all that means that these recaps won’t be full of beautiful scenery (thought there was definitely some of that). But I’m not a travel blogger, so I don’t imagine you all are here for gorgeous pictures….

First off- why South Africa? Our trip to South AFrica was organized by EF Tours, a company that does educational travel for middle and high school students, both domestic and international. The 14 year old’s English teacher has been a trip leader for EF tours for several years now, having taken students to Italy, Vietnam, Japan, and Brazil. The past couple of trips that I had seen flyers for had been to places that either we had already been to, or which I could see us going to on our own. For whatever reason, South Africa was a place that felt daunting to plan a trip to on our own. So when I saw that the summer 2025 trip was to South Africa, I really wanted to go. Truth, I probably wanted to go more than the 13 year old.

EF takes care of everything – flights, accommodations, tour guides, transportation, most meals. We just sign up, give them our money, pack our bags and passport and show up at the airport. The last time I did a travel tour was twenty years ago, when I went with my mother to Egypt and Turkey. Or maybe it was two separate tours? I don’t remember – my mother has a friend who is a travel agent/tour guide, and her friend often takes friends on tours as guinea pigs to work out the kinks before she makes the tours available for her business. Turkey and Egypt were two of those test tours. Anyhow, multi day tours aren’t necessarily something that I usually gravitate towards – I think it’s a cost and flexibility thing for me. I will say, though, this EF tours was really well run. Each day was PACKED. I might have liked to travel at a more savoring pace, but I did appreciate how much we covered in one week and how little mental energy it took.

Our flight left at 10pm on a Monday evening. It would be a day and a half of travel, including a long layover in London. The Husband and the 5 year old dropped us off at the airport. Touchingly, the 5 year old was really upset we were leaving – she cried in the car the whole way to the airport. But the Husband took her to McDonalds on the way home and apparently she stopped crying. Hah.

The flights were all very smooth. On the flight to London Heathrow, I slept some, I watched some tv, read. Luckily I was in an aisle seat, so I could get up and stretch and go to the bathroom whenever I wanted. For some reason, the 13 year old was sitting a few rows behind me and didn’t want to switch seats to sit closer to me even though the seat next to me was empty. We arrived at Heathrow in the late morning and had a nine hour layover, so we took the Heathrow Express into London, getting off at Paddington Station. I highly recommend the Heathrow Express – we were in London in about 20 minutes. We were all much too exhausted to really do anything, and plus we had all our carryon luggage with us, so we walked to Hyde Park where we could rest our feet. The 13 year old and I found a nice place to sit under a tree; I bought us an iced chai and a vegetarian sausage roll at a cafe in the park and we just soaked up the sun and shade and people watched and sketched in our sketch books.

For lunch our group wandered back towards Paddington Station and we all found lunch on our own. I got fish and chips from Micky’s Fish and Chips – one of those tiny counter service and two table places that you read about in rom com books. They really exist folk! The fish and chips did not come wrapped in newspaper, like I was lead to believe from the movies, but the portions were HUGE! I felt bad because I bought two of the smallest size and we only ended up eating one. We sat in a park that had Paddington statues and ate our fish and chips. I sketched some of the buildings across from the park. Even though we weren’t doing any “touristy” things, the few hours we spent in London were still exciting, with that buzz of being in a foreign country.

After we finished out lunch and rested in the park, we met back up with out group and headed back to Heathrow airport for the next leg of our flight- a twelve hour flight to Johannesburg. The flight itself was pretty uneventful, I watched movies and slept and read a little and tried to get up and stretch once in a while. We arrived in Johannesburg at 7:00 am- it was a long day and half of traveling, but our adventures were just beginning!

Day 1: Arrival in Johannesburg. We were met at the airport by our tour guide and he got us on our bus. There were two other school groups in our tour – one from North Carolina and one from Bethesda, MD, which is actually near us. Both the groups were from high schools, and interestingly were all girls. (There were two boys in our group) We were taken immediately on a tour of Soweto, a township in Johannesburg that is southwest of central Johannesburg. Soweto was formed in the 1930s when the government, looking to segregate the population of South Africa, created “Black” townships and moved a lot of Black people there.

This first day we learned a lot about the history of Apartheid and the fight for equality in South Africa. The topics were very sobering and it might have been a little too heavy for us all just having got off an overnight international flight, but I’m glad to have seen all the spots we visited.

The bus took us through Soweto, and we had a local guide, Mama Queen, who told us about the history of Soweto. Even today, parts of residential Soweto have no electricity or running water. Mama Queen said that after the end of Apartheid, the new government said housing was a basic human right, but the government has not been able to deliver on that.

Our first stop in Soweto was the Hector Peterson Museum. Peterson was a 12 year old boy who was killed in the Soweto uprisings in 1976, when students gathered to protest the use of Afrikaans as the primary language in schools. Outside the museum there is a statue in tribute to Hector Peterson and inside the museum were many first person accounts if the Soweto uprisings. The accounts were from both sides of the conflict, and it really made me think about how deeply entrenched and systematic racism is. In the middle of the museum was a courtyard scattered with bricks, each brick with the name of someone who died in the uprising.

We next visited Nelson Mandela’s house in Orlando. Before the trip had just finished Mandela’s memoir Long Walk to Freedom, and he writes often about this simple house where he lived before he went to jail. It was the first house that he ever purchases, and it was here that his children were born. The compact house is full of pictures, awards, commendations, and framed letters honoring Mandela. There were only three rooms in the house and thinking about how Mandela lived here in this tiny space while being a lawyer, while fighting for South African equality was certainly humbling.

We then had lunch at a nearby restaurant – the lunch was buffet style, which the 13 year old loved because she loves a buffet. There was soup, stews, rice dishes, yams, cake, salad. There were even chicken feet, which made me happy. I love eating chicken feet at dim sum, and seeing such a niche food in a foreign country tickled me. We were sitting in the outdoor portion of the restaurants and buskers frequently came by to serenade us, their music loud and rhythmic.

Following lunch we went to the Apartheid Museum, a place of many hard truths. There were so many things that stuck with me from this museum – the entry way where each person was given a ticket that said “White” or “Non-White”, and had to go through the correct door; the walls of pass books (during Apartheid Black people had to carry pass books with them all the time or risk being jailed); There was one exhibit which featured full sized pictures of people viewed from the back, an exercise in realizing that it wasn’t always easy to see the color of someone’s skin, moreover that exhibit was used to describe how people could be “reclassified” on a whim; the interview footage with Mandela; the interview footage with the white leaders who talked about their duty to be the guardians of the Black people – I thought the degree to which they didn’t view Black or Coloured people as equal humans so fascinating – they truly believed that white people were genetically superior and that they were doing God’s work by keeping Black’s separate. All in all we only spent ninety minutes at the Apartheid Museum, but I could have spent half a day there. There was an entire exhibit on Mandela and another one that about reconciliation that I only got to skim.

After the Apartheid Museum we were taken to our hotel where we had a buffet dinner before turning in for the night. (Buffet was kind of a food theme of the trip, which I think is common and makes a lot of sense for tour groups.)

Day Two: Day Two was another history filled day. We started the day with a visit to the Cradle of Humankind, a Unesco World Heritage site where many fossils of ancestral humans were found. We didn’t actually see any remains or archeological sites, but rather visited the museum/ visitor’s on the site. To be honest, the museum was a little run down, with paint chipping and a couple of the interactive exhibits not working. The information, however, was fascinating. I especially liked the hallway that had the timeline of earth on it. The hallway stretched on and on, but the portion where humans were on earth was maybe two feet of space. Apparently we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. So the world has built up and become extinct five times already. That all gave me a sense of perspective. Surrounding the Cradle of Humanity museum are walking trails – I wish we had had time to go on a walk on these trails because the scenery was beautiful.

After leaving the Cradle of Humanity, we stopped at a mall for lunch on our own. The 13 year old and I picked up some poke bowls and dumplings and boba – always fun to find boba tea in a foreign country! While waiting for our food, I went to pick up a charging cable because I had discovered that I had left mine at home. While I was there I also got a new screen protector for my phone – the store had a fancy machine that custom cut the screen. protectors. I thought that was pretty cool. It was kind of fun to do something so ordinary, like buying a screen protector, in a foreign country.

Our next stop after lunch was Constitution Hill, where South Africa’s Constitutional Court is located. Also on the site is the Old Fort, Number Four Prison, Women’s Prison and Hospital, all of which now is a Museum. The prison was known as the “Robben Island of Johannesburg” because in addition to common law criminals, a lot of political dissidents were imprisoned there, including Mahatma Gandhi. Nelson Mandela was once held in the Hospital. Number Four was where the Black prisoners were held. Touring the museum was very sobering – we got to see the rooms where people were packed past capacity, the courtyard where they ate their meager food, the latrines next to those courtyard, which meant that often bodily waste flowed around their feet while eating. We saw the cells where people were held in solitary confinement. The tour guide told us about the harrowing and traumatizing experiences inflicted on the prisoner by both the prison wardens and other prisoners.

I was struck by the exhibit of blanket sculptures. When the prison was occupied, on Sundays there would be a contest among prisoners to build elaborate blanket sculptures, the prize for the winner would be an additional crust of bread. The exhibit featured blanket sculptures which the museum had made by former prisoners of Number Four. I had always associated blanket sculptures with fancy hotels or cruise ships, but seeing the elaborate creations that these prisoner made, made me think about how our desire to create things of beauty and complexity persisted even in prison.

The next building we saw on Constitution Hill was the Constitutional Court Building, which was opened in 2004. One thing striking about the building was the entry way – tall, and decorated with carvings to represent the principles of the South African Constitution, the doors are the way everyone enters and exits the building, prisoners, judges, lawyers, the public. The guide said that there are no back entrances to the building because the court was built with the idea that everyone is equal so everyone must use the same doors. (I find it a bit of a fire and security hazard that there are NO other doors – perhaps there are no other public entrances?). Inside, we were told a little bit about the history of present day South Africa. South Africa has 12 official languages, and the guide pointed out to us the room where all the interpreters sit. The bricks in the main court were taken from parts of the prison that were torn down, as a reminder of South Africa’s past.

After we left Constitution Hill, the bus dropped us off at a Mall – Mandela Square. I guess they figured a bunch of teens and tweens would really love to spend a spare hour shopping. The mall had many of the same stores you see in America, a lot of them were the high end things. There was also a library and a theatre in Mandela Square, but those were closed so we I didn’t get to go in. The 13 year old and I aren’t huge shoppers, but we do always like to check out grocery stores when we travel; grocery stores are such a great peek ar what a country is like. We bought a bunch of snacks and blueberries too because by this point I was feeling a severe lack of fresh fruit in my life. The blueberries were so sweet and crisp. The 13 year old and I ended up always buying more blueberries whenever we got a chance for the rest of the trip.

Some images from things we saw at Checkers, a grocery/ home store – it felt kind of like a Super Walmart:

Then the bus returned us to the hotel and we had dinner at the restaurant next to the hotel. For dessert, I had my first experience with Malva pudding – a South African sponge cake that often has cream poured over it. It has a springy moist texture and is not too sweet. We would come to eat many pieces of Malva pudding in the weeks to come. I am clearly not a food or travel blogger or I would have taken perfectly lit pictures of the Malva pudding so you could almost taste it. But you’ll just have to take my word that it was delicious. Plus, it’s a very humble looking cake, and perhaps not very photogenic.

We returned to our rooms to pack and turn in for the night because the next day we were going to check out of our hotel and head for our next adventure: Kruger National Park and a Safari Lodge!

So that’s part one of South Africa adventures!
Have you ever taken advantage of a layover to see a bonus city? Do you visit grocery stores when traveling? Do you like visiting historic sites when you travel?