From the Melville Cat:

Good day, friends. I have sad news: This will be my final blog post.

I am writing to you from Beyond. I don’t know where I’ve gone, exactly. But all is well. I will try my best to explain.

On Saturday I participated in the first-ever #SpazaShopTour, starting and ending at African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong.

The weather was miraculously perfect for a six-kilometer walk. We wound through Katlehong and Thokoza, visiting spaza shops and street-side cafés and historical sites, chatting with each other and those we met along the way. Bongani, our host, walked us past his family home and explained what it was like to grow up in Katlehong in the early 1990s, when a deadly war broke out as the apartheid regime came to an end.

Remember that time I published a blog post every day for 100 days, and I had nothing to post except flowers and cats but you all enjoyed it anyway? (Or maybe you just read it anyway because you had nothing better to do?)

Zoo Lake, a popular public park in Parkview across Jan Smuts Avenue from the Johannesburg Zoo, is one of the most popular parks in Joburg and less than a ten-minute drive from my house. Yet I have not blogged about Zoo Lake for nearly a decade. (Here’s my post about it from January 2011.) How is this possible?

Many of you may remember my post about the African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong, which I visited for the first time in June.

I’ve kept going back, for various reasons. Every time I go I wind up spending hours sitting outside the spaza shop, chatting with my friends Bongani and Nkosikhona about anything and everything. At some point the three of us started talking about organizing a tour.

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the central section of the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. Most of you know I visit the Koppies often, but this walk was special.

The Melville Koppies reserve is divided into three sections: East, Central, and West. The East and West sections are open to the public, and I usually walk in the East section. The Central section is normally closed to the public except for guided tours, due to its rare biodiversity and archeological sites. (There is a well-preserved Iron Age furnace in the Central section.)

Last week, when I published a post about my cycling tour with Honest Travel, I mentioned our visit to the Bertrams Inner City Farm. I decided that visit was far too brief to give the farm proper justice in my blog. So I went back again yesterday.