My Favorite Jozi Coffee Shops: Vice in Craighall Park

Eleventh in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg.

Vice, a coffee shop next to CNR Café in Craighall Park, has become a semi-regular coffee hangout for me lately. I’ve held off on blogging about it because it’s a tricky place to describe.

Big Night Out at Uncle Harry's Roadhouse

Fourth in my “Roadhouses of Gauteng” series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

Thorsten and I did another roadhouse mission last weekend. This time we headed west, journeying up Ondekkers Road to Uncle Harry’s Roadhouse in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein.

Dinner at Johnny Guitar Drive In (Roadhouse) in Alberton

Third in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

The Johnny Guitar Drive In, a roadhouse in downtown Alberton on Joburg’s East Rand, has a long and complex history. I’ll try to summarize what I know in a few sentences.

The Blogitects Spend a Night in Wild Wepener

I waited until the last minute before deciding where to stay on the last night of the Blogitect Road Trip. The first eight nights of the trip were meticulously planned, but I delayed choosing a stopover town for the ninth night. I wanted to find an unusual town – something interesting and unexpected – off the beaten path but also roughly halfway between the Sunshine Coast and Joburg.

I Climbed a Mine Dump in Soweto

In my recent post about the Chilli Pepper restaurant, I briefly referred to a mine dump at the end of Immink Drive in Diepkloof, Soweto.

Mine dump behind Chilli Pepper on Immink Drive
The big hill in the background is a mine dump.
View of mine dump at the end of Immink Drive
Another look from further down the street.

Like many Joburgers, I’ve always been both fascinated and appalled by these mountains of golden waste. Mine dumps are massive monuments to human greed, reminders of a time when insatiable hunger for gold drove powerful men to empty the earth beneath Johannesburg, pile it up where it didn’t belong, then leave that poisoned earth to blow dust into the lungs of former mine workers who – like the mine waste itself – got tossed away like garbage once they were no longer useful to the money-making machine.