#Travel

Last weekend I attended my second #SpazaShopTour of Katlehong and Thokoza (see my post about the first tour), and visited the Thokoza Memorial for the first time. The Thokoza Memorial, opened in 1999, honors the people who died in this area during the violent political conflict in the years leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Kaapsehoop is the (long belated) third stop in my #10SouthAfricanTowns project, for which I’m visiting ten small towns across South Africa. Read about my first stop in Val and my second stop in Kameel.

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?

Many of you may remember my post about the African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong, which I visited for the first time in June.

I’ve kept going back, for various reasons. Every time I go I wind up spending hours sitting outside the spaza shop, chatting with my friends Bongani and Nkosikhona about anything and everything. At some point the three of us started talking about organizing a tour.

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the central section of the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. Most of you know I visit the Koppies often, but this walk was special.

The Melville Koppies reserve is divided into three sections: East, Central, and West. The East and West sections are open to the public, and I usually walk in the East section. The Central section is normally closed to the public except for guided tours, due to its rare biodiversity and archeological sites. (There is a well-preserved Iron Age furnace in the Central section.)