#South Africa

Artüro, a new-ish restaurant on 7th Street in Melville, appears Mexican at first glance. As someone who is always on the lookout for Mexican food in Joburg, I was excited to check out Artüro after spotting a photo of a platter of tacos on the “I Love Melville” Facebook page.

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.

As mentioned previously, Thorsten and I (a.k.a. “the Blogitects”: one blogger + one architect) recently got back from a roadtrip to the Northern Cape to celebrate my 50th birthday. I had never properly explored the Northern Cape, South Africa’s largest and least populated province, and passing the half-century mark seemed like a good reason to finally do it. After overnighting in a retro Campovan in Kameel, our first stop in the Northern Cape was Augrabies Falls National Park.

I last visited Kameel, a tiny hamlet in South Africa’s North West Province, in February 2020 as part of my (never finished) #10SouthAfricanTowns project. At the time, I was certain I’d be back in Kameel before 2020 was over; it’s a perfect stopover point on the way to the Northern Cape, which I planned to explore later that year. But then covid happened, of course. So I didn’t make it back to Kameel until last week – more than four years later – when I finally did that Northern Cape road trip to celebrate my 50th birthday.

I used to write about food in the East Rand – the municipality just to the east of Joburg, officially called Ekurhuleni – all the time. (For a few examples, see here and here and here.) But it’s been far too long since I’ve recommended a food spot in the East, so I’m dropping in quickly to tell you about Zani Eatery in Katlehong.

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.