#Parks

I last blogged about the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve, a huge Joburg City Park on the south side of the city, more than 11 years ago. I don’t normally like to blog about the same place twice but I think it’s time for a Klipriviersberg refresher. It’s a truly remarkable outdoor space and I suspect a significant percentage of Joburgers are unaware of this “Jewel of the South”, as the locals call it.

On Sunday I stopped by a cleanup event at the Brixton Cemetery, hosted by the Friends of Johannesburg Cemeteries. The volunteer group regularly organizes cleanups at different cemeteries around the city, picking up rubbish and restoring the older headstones.

I recently spent two days with Joburg Tourism exploring different places around town with a small group of lady bloggers/influencers. It was a strange time to embark on this journey, right as the city plunged into a third covid wave, but the event was planned weeks earlier and I really wanted to go through with it. I’ve been socially distanced from my own city for the past 18 months and felt eager to reacquaint myself.

Today is Election Day in the United States. I had been thinking I could be sort of normal – write a blog post, go about my day, etc. My vote has already been cast, after all. I’m a hemisphere away from America and there’s nothing more I can do. Plus it’s probably going to be a few days before we even know the outcome, and fretting seems fruitless.

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?