#Photography

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.

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.

I’m not sure when I first saw a photo of the Big Pineapple. It might have been in a blog post, or maybe somewhere on Instagram. But I do know one thing for certain: The moment I saw the Big Pineapple, it rocketed to the top of my South African must-see list.

Last year, before the pandemic, I started a campaign called #10SouthAfricanTowns. I planned to visit ten small towns all over South Africa during 2020. Bathurst, 20 kilometers inland from Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape, was one of the first towns I put on the list. It had been a dream destination of mine for years.

Six years ago, during a wild road trip in a van full of bloggers, I spent a night at the Royal Hotel in Bethulie. I was enchanted: Bethulie is a charming, tiny South African town and the Royal Hotel was one of the quirkiest guesthouses I’d ever stayed in. I vowed to go back someday and spend a little more time.

Although the Nizamiye Mosque is huge and impossible to miss when driving north on the M1 highway, it remains one of Joburg’s best kept secrets.

I think most Joburgers know there is a mosque there (since it’s impossible not to see). But I think few know the story behind the mosque, and even fewer know the mosque is open to the public (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) and that there are so many cool things to do there.