#History

It was a blustery winter afternoon on my 50th birthday. The Blogitects were headed to Stuurmansfontein, an iconic corbelled house in the middle of the Great Karoo, and I was super excited. But the sun was sinking fast and I was also starting to freak out.

Last Thursday evening I went to Soweto with a group of journalists, tourists, and locals, and we did a simple yet revolutionary thing: We walked around at night. The walk was part of a new tourism experience called “Soweto Night Out”, founded by the creator of Funk It I’m Walking.

Every time I think I’ve visited all the historic churches in downtown Joburg, another one pops out of the woodwork. My latest “discovery” is the spectacular Cathedral of St. Mary the Virgin, or St. Mary’s Cathedral, on Wanderers Street in the Joburg CBD.

I recently learned a bonkers statistic: Around 40% of all of the hominid fossils ever discovered were unearthed in the Cradle of Humankind. In other words, close to half of all the known fossils from our human ancestors – in the entire world – came out of the ground right here in Gauteng Province. This UNESCO World Heritage Site, less than an hour from Joburg, is more than a bunch of bucolic green hills – it’s one of the most important archeological regions on earth.

Regular readers will know that I’ve written a couple of posts about Noordgesig – affectionately called Bulte, which means “Hills” in Afrikaans – lately (see here and here). Last year I befriended Lavinia and Fabian Otto, who live in Noordgesig, and they’ve been slowly introducing me to Bulte’s unique history and culture.

Mapungubwe National Park was the second stop on the Blogitects’ Limpopo road trip. Read about our first and third stops.

I’ve been procrastinating on this post about Mapungubwe National Park because I don’t know where to start. Mapungubwe, which is at the far northern tip of South Africa, across the border from both Zimbabwe and Botswana, was the whole reason we planned our Limpopo road trip; I’d been wanting to go there forever. There is a lot going on in Mapungubwe and it’s a difficult place to explain.