After a short flight down to London, a rather long wait in the Lounge and a longish flight to Johannesburg we set foot on South African soil at 0745.    It took longer to collect the hire car than it did to clear Customs and Immigration but eventually we set out for Pretoria.   We felt reasonably at home on the freeway, the drivers are as bad, but probably worse than those in WA.    With only one wrong turn we reach our destination, the Sheraton Hotel.    A very well appointed room with a huge bed awaited us.    We very soon realised that everyone expected a tip and discovered that R20 was the norm, about AUD2.    Our bags were unloaded and on an ornate trolley almost before we got out of the car.    We went to see if we could get a like snack.   The was a bar snack list and we ordered salads…….35 mins later our salads arrived, there very nice, as was the glass of unwooded chardonnay that we had with them.    We orderd two decaf cappuccinos but got two long blacks and a jug of milk, was it decaf, well we did not suffer, so possibly!   We spent a couple of hours dozing before going down to dinner, which was a buffet but with an enormous range of options all international, ie; nothing obviously local.

Saturday 18th

We thought that the best was to get an idea of what Pretoria was like was to to take a guided tour.   Our guide was an Afrikaner named Gert who was probably the same as us or a little older but very good with an excellent knowledge of his city, of which he is very proud but in his words heartbroken at what has happened to it and the rest of South Africa in the last few years.  

It is a bit like Australia (particularly Canberra) in that it’s ‘built’ history is relatively short and there are no really old buildings before the late 18th c.   The Union building was built between 1912 and 1914.    Nelson Mandela is the great national hero of course, this statue was erected in 2014.   The memorial is to those who died in the two World Wars and represents Castor and Pollux holding hands over a horse.

     

Old Victorian houses would not normally grab our attention but this one is a bit different.  It belonged to George Hays a Pretoria businessman who lived here with his wife and three daughters.  

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The remarkable thing about the house is twofold, firstly it  was really quite modern for a colonial building, with radiator central heating and a proper shower with an interesting control panel.

You could select Shower or Plunge (bath), hot or cold and then pump the water away to Waste.

The second and possibly the more remarkable is the house was left with all its contents, everything, furniture, bedding, crockery, cutlery, curtains, carpets, paintings, etc., in 1939 when George Hays died.   His two surviving daughters came from the UK for his funeral but clearly returned home immediately.    ‘They even left their widow’s weeds’ and even a travelling trunk!

         The indicator board was to note what needed to be bought on the next shopping trip.   The house also contains some beautiful stained glass, made in Italy.   The contents must be worth a fortune but the upkeep is expensive and there would appear to be little money money to pay for it.

The old parliament building is in a part of town where you don’t stop and get out so the photo is from the road.   The two statues are of Paul Kruger and Bortha.   The other statue is that of the Zulu king whose name I can’t spell but apparently he is depicted with a bow and arrows, which the Zulus never used!

    

   The ‘fir trees’ are really mobile phone towers – made in Ireland!

The Voortrekker Memorial commemorates the trek by the Boers south from the Transvaal in the early 19th c, these are the people who established this area and made it prosperous but not before having some horrendous battles with the Zulus.    The Zulus originally agreed to allow some of the settlers to share their land but when they realised that there were another thousand settlers and that the agreement that they were signing only left 20% of their country to them they reciprocated with some terrible atrocities.   Of course, the Boers won in the end.

The inside of the building has reliefs depicting this journey and the strife that ensued, they are 2.5 metres tall,made of marble a nd go all the way round the inside walls which are 35m long and difficult to photograph.

          

The gardens are very pretty, many of the flowers being similar to our own in WA.    These two are Euphorbia, deadly poisonous to everything except young rhino who apparently can eat them with impunity.

  

Our overall impression of Pretoria, not very favourable really, it is generally dirty, you don’t see white people on the streets, the population is 82% black, many, many of them illegal immigrants from the countries to plains Camp is a well laid out bush camp the north.   It might look prettier in spring when the estimated ‘one million’ jacarandas are out!

Tomorrow we have to leave at 0700 to drive to the Kruger Game Park for our walking safari.